Designing a gamified social platform for people living with dementia and their live-in family caregivers

In the current paper, a social gamified platform for people living with dementia and their live-in family caregivers, integrating a broader diagnostic approach and interactive interventions is presented. The CAREGIVERSPRO-MMD (C-MMD) platform constitutes a support tool for the patient and the informal caregiver - also referred to as the dyad - that strengthens self-care, and builds community capacity and engagement at the point of care. The platform is implemented to improve social collaboration, adherence to treatment guidelines through gamification, recognition of progress indicators and measures to guide management of patients with dementia, and strategies and tools to improve treatment interventions and medication adherence. Moreover, particular attention was provided on guidelines, considerations and user requirements for the design of a User-Centered Design (UCD) platform. The design of the platform has been based on a deep understanding of users, tasks and contexts in order to improve platform usability, and provide adaptive and intuitive User Interfaces with high accessibility. In this paper, the architecture and services of the C-MMD platform are presented, and specifically the gamification aspects. © 2018 Association for Computing Machinery.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Designing Wiimprovisation for Mediation in Group Music Therapy with Children Suffering from Behavioral Disorders

International audienceWe present qualitative experimental evidence that the "Wiimprovisation" process of using Nintendo Wiimotes as virtual instruments linked to a musical sound system within the framework of Group Music Therapy sessions can provide effective psychodynamic mediation for patients. We designed and implemented specific modalities for movement-based sound control and tested our tool in two clinical settings with children (age 7 to 12) suffering from behavioral disorders. Our preliminary results show immediate acceptance of, long term motivation for and meaningful expression through our system by patients. Future work will focus on assessing the therapeutic potential of our platform's personalization features in a controlled experiment

The Curative Power of Play: The Voices of Therapists around the World

It is important for all therapists to be culturally sensitive to children and their eco-systems as well as to be aware of the current trends and the changing application of play as a healing agent. The focus of this study is on the development of a current description of play by therapists from a global perspective through a thematic analysis of focus groups resulting in an explanation of how play contributes to healing and the practice of therapy. In this study, the naturalistic method of qualitative research (Bowers, 2009; Lincoln & Guba, 1985) was applied to the study of play around the world, resulting in a new description of “play”. The analyses of focus group meetings in Morocco, Singapore, Hong Kong, Canada and Europe resulted in the emergence of 8 themes: productivity through play, contribution to development, facilitation of the relationship through play, honouring diversity, collaboration between children and caregivers, stimulation through technology-based play, relaxation provided by play, and the devaluation of play. These themes, which are presented through the “voices of the participants”, together with the literature review, serve to enrich the changing description of play. With participants from all continents, a current global perspective highlights the changes that play, both as a concept and as a healing agent, has undergone and will continue to do so. New information emerged suggesting that technology has become a worldwide focus for children but has a paradoxical effect on their relationships

Editorial: Positive Technology: Designing E-experiences for Positive Change

While there is little doubt that our lives are becoming increasingly digital, whether this change is for the better or for the worse is far from being settled. Rather, over the past years concerns about the personal and social impacts of technologies have been growing, fueled by dystopian Orwellian scenarios that almost on daily basis are generously dispensed by major Western media outlets. According to a recent poll involving some 1,150 experts, 47% of respondents predict that individuals’ well-being will bemore helped than harmed by digital life in the next decade, while 32% say people’s well-being will bemore harmed than helped. Only 21% of those surveyed indicated that the impact of technologies on people well-being will be negligible compared to now (Pew Research Center, 2018)

Multisensory interactive technologies for primary education: From science to technology

While technology is increasingly used in the classroom, we observe at the same time that making teachers and students accept it is more difficult than expected. In this work, we focus on multisensory technologies and we argue that the intersection between current challenges in pedagogical practices and recent scientific evidence opens novel opportunities for these technologies to bring a significant benefit to the learning process. In our view, multisensory technologies are ideal for effectively supporting an embodied and enactive pedagogical approach exploiting the best-suited sensory modality to teach a concept at school. This represents a great opportunity for designing technologies, which are both grounded on robust scientific evidence and tailored to the actual needs of teachers and students. Based on our experience in technology-enhanced learning projects, we propose six golden rules we deem important for catching this opportunity and fully exploiting it

Why so serious? On the relation of serious games and learning

Serious games have become a key segment in the games market as well as in academic research. Although the number of games that identify themselves as belonging to this category as well as the research done on their effects has been rapidly growing, there has thus far been no attempt to define all of the various opportunities that digital games provide for learning. To address this issue we look at existing definitions of serious games and their potential for learning. We identify the shortcomings of existing definitions and typologies. We discuss opportunities for an educational use of serious games which have been marginalized so far and develop a more flexible classification system for serious games in order to include commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) games for learning purposes and description options for future developments of gaming technology. This classification system for digital and serious games uses labels and tags as a preferable solution instead of fixed genre categories. The aim of this paper is to move the focus from what serious games and their uses for learning currently are to what they can be

Fostering Health Education With a Serious Game in Children With Asthma: Pilot Studies for Assessing Learning Efficacy and Automatized Learning Personalization

Coupled with Health Education programs, an e-learning platform—KidBreath—was participatory designed and assessed in situ (Study 1) and was augmented and tested with an Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) based on Multi-Armed Bandit Methods (Study 2). For each study, the impact of KidBreath practice was assessed in children with asthma in terms of pedagogical efficacy (knowledge of the illness), pedagogical efficiency (usability, type of motivation and level of interest elicited), and therapeutic effect (illness perception, system's expectation and judgement in disease self-management, child's implication in study). For the Study 1, asthma children aged 8 to 11 years used the tool at home without time pressure for 2 months according to a predefined learning sequence defined by the research team. Results supported pedagogical efficacy of KidBreath, with a significant increase of general knowledge about asthma after use. It also featured a greater learning gain for children knowing the least about the illness before use. Results on pedagogical efficiency revealed a great intrinsic motivation elicited by KidBreath showing a deep level of interest in the edutainment activities. Study 2 explored an augmented version of KidBreath with learning optimization algorithm (called ZPDES) after its use during 1 month. Pedagogical efficacy was less conclusive than Study 1 because less content was displayed due to algorithm parameters. However, the ITS-augmented KidBreath use showed a strong impact in pedagogical efficiency and therapeutic adherence features. Even if implementation improvements must be done in future works, this preliminary study highlighted the viability of our methods to design an ITS as serious game in health education context for all chronic diseases