Games for health for children - current status and needed research

Videogames for health (G4H) offer exciting, innovative, potentially highly effective methods for increasing knowledge, delivering persuasive messages, changing behaviors, and influencing health outcomes. Although early outcome results are promising, additional research is needed to determine the game design and behavior change procedures that best promote G4H effectiveness and to identify and minimize possible adverse effects. Guidelines for ideal use of different types of G4H by children and adolescents should be elucidated to enhance effectiveness and minimize adverse effects. G4H stakeholders include organizational implementers, policy makers, players and their families, researchers, designers, retailers, and publishers. All stakeholders should be involved in G4H development and have a voice in setting goals to capitalize on their insights to enhance effectiveness and use of the game. In the future, multiple targeted G4H should be available to meet a population's diverse health needs in developmentally appropriate ways. Substantial, consistent, and sophisticated research with appropriate levels of funding is needed to realize the benefits of G4H

A serious game to improve engagement with web accessibility guidelines

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Behaviour & Information Technology on 07 Jan 2020, available online: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0144929X.2019.171145

Interactive Feedforward for Improving Performance and Maintaining Intrinsic Motivation in VR Exergaming

Exergames commonly use low to moderate intensity exercise protocols. Their effectiveness in implementing high intensity protocols remains uncertain. We propose a method for improving performance while maintaining intrinsic motivation in high intensity VR exergaming. Our method is based on an interactive adaptation of the feedforward method: a psychophysical training technique achieving rapid improvement in performance by exposing participants to self models showing previously unachieved performance levels. We evaluated our method in a cycling-based exergame. Participants competed against (i) a self model which represented their previous speed; (ii) a self model representing their previous speed but increased resistance therefore requiring higher performance to keep up; or (iii) a virtual competitor at the same two levels of performance. We varied participants' awareness of these differences. Interactive feedforward led to improved performance while maintaining intrinsic motivation even when participants were aware of the interventions, and was superior to competing against a virtual competitor

Don’t sweat the small stuff: the effect of challenge-skill manipulation on electrodermal activity

Challenge plays a critical role in enabling an enjoyable and successful player experience, but not all dimensions of challenge are well understood. A more nuanced understanding of challenge and its role in the player experience is possible through assessing player psychophysiology. The psychophysiology of challenge (i.e. what occurs physiologically during experiences of video game challenge) has been the focus of some player experience research, but consensus as to the physiological markers of challenge has not been reached. To further explore the psychophysiological impact of challenge, three video game conditions – varying by degree of challenge – were developed and deployed within a large-scale psychophysiological study (n = 90). Results show decreased electrodermal activity (EDA) in the low-challenge video game condition compared to the medium- and high-challenge conditions, with a statistically non-significant but consistent pattern found between the medium- and high-challenge conditions. Overall, these results suggest electrodermal response increases with challenge. Despite the intuitiveness of some of these conclusions, the results do not align with extant literature. Possible explanations for the incongruence with the literature are discussed. Ultimately, with this work we hope to both enable a more complete understanding of challenge in the player experience, and contribute to a more granular understanding of the psychophysiological experience of play

ANIM3: ANIMated ANIMals as A Numbing Immersive Mechanic

A high prevalence of "acute pain"within hospital emergency departments and side-effects of current practices calls for new additional treatment measures. Alternatives to analgesics include Animal Assisted Therapy (AAT) and Virtual Reality (VR). Whereas proven effectively separately, the combination AAT techniques and VR analgesia has received no or scant attention. In this paper we focus on exploring this field through exploring the literature from the separate approaches and show how they would fit together, conceptualized in a new VR application ANIM3. Leading in this development process, besides the extensive literature review, were stakeholder interviews. Our first user encounters gained positive responses to the prototype. As a whole, we see strong indications that "acute pain"reduction in the hospital based on AAT principles in Virtual Reality is a promising technique. We postulate that these experiences should add well timed heightened distractions, while keeping the contextual factors in mind leading to interactions of a maximum of about 15 mins, with limited or no need for explanations, and limit need of locomotion and two-hand controls. We recommend the creation of proposals to further development and research to explore these possibilities to their full potential

Multi-Site Data Collection and Evaluation in Spoken Language Understanding

The Air Travel Information System (ATIS) domain serves as the common task for DARPA spoken language system research and development. The approaches and results possible in this rapidly growing area are structured by available corpora, annotations of that data, and evaluation methods. Coordination of this crucial infrastructure is the charter of the Multi-Site ATIS Data COllection Working group (MADCOW) . We focus here on selection of training and test data, evaluation of language understanding, and the continuing search for evaluation methods that will correlate well with expected performance of the technology in applications. 1. Introduction Data availability and evaluation procedures structure research possibilities: the type and amount of training data affects the performance of existing algorithms and limits the development of new algorithms; and evaluation procedures document progress, and force research choices in a world of limited resources. The recent rapid progress in spoke..