Diving into a decade of games for health research: a systematic review

Recent years have been characterised by a rising interest in using enter tainment computing to monitor, maintain, and improve human health. This is observed in many systems and applications that leverage the benefits of a playful and enjoyable experience to provide a technology-enabled health intervention. This paper reviews one decade of papers (679) published at the intersection of health, entertainment and technology to determine trends, studies’ characteristics, type of solutions, domains of application and study purposes. Results show that there is a growing body of research in the area, with the majority of studies provid ing solutions for rehabilitation and addressing motor conditions related to stroke and/or fitness. Where half of the solutions reported are custom made, the bulk of those studies is performed with the purpose of evaluating the solutions pro posed or validating their efficacy. In 80% of the cases, the studies are performed with subjects from the target population with sample sizes that have been steadily increasing over the years.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

In the eye of the beholder:promoting learner-centric design to develop mobile games for learning

Out of the project EMuRgency a game-based learning environment evolved, which trains school children in providing reanimation and cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR). The application gets players to act as if they were in a real case of emergency. This paper reports on a formal usability study conducted with two different groups of learners, regular learners and learners with special educational needs (SEN). With the study we compared the two groups of learners with regard to game usability and effectiveness of the intervention. Our intention was to better understand the different needs and requirements to learning materials that game designer need to take into consideration in order to make the learning experience successful for both groups. A total of 89 children played the game simulation. Results showed differences in perception and effectiveness of individual mechanisms for the two groups with regard to usability or switching between tasks and mobile device.This publication was partly financed by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), regions of the Euregio Meuse-Rhine and the participating institutions under the INTERREG IVa program (EMR.INT4-1.2.-2011-04/070, http://www.emurgency.eu)

Design and evaluation of a fall prevention multiplayer game for senior care centres

Preventing falls is extremely important today as people live long sedentary lives. Fall prevention platforms can help, by stimulating seniors to perform exercises that improve balance and muscular strength. However, existing platforms for fall prevention mostly target individual users exercising at home. This paper describes the design and evaluation of a multi-player fall prevention game platform, FallSensing Games, to be used in senior care centers. The game design was inspired by the Otago Exercise Programme and the evaluation focused on biomechanical parameters, game experience, and technology acceptance. Results showed that the game was easy to follow, that seniors performed exercises correctly, and that the game integrated well with the activities of the senior care centers. Lessons learned from this project may inspire the development of similar platforms, and, in this way, support group exercise practices at senior care centers

Sense: An interactive learning application that visualizes the nerve supply of face

Human Nervous System is one of the basic yet most difficult topics in medical education. With millions of neurons from varied origins, pathways and types regulating different functions, it is the least understood system of human body. Among all the organs, the face has a dense nerve innervations in a compact area making it a challenge for students to gain the required anatomical expertise. The Sense project is an effort made to overcome this challenging task by enabling interactive learning with the help of an intuitive user interface. The ability to learn and test the anatomical knowledge based on a novel three dimensional head with particle flow animations to visualize nerve impulse propagation makes this application stand out from the conventional and interactive methods of anatomy education. This paper presents the design and development of this application using the Unity 3D game engine. Possible future improvements for evaluation are also discussed

A Serious Game to Support Decision Making in Medical Education.

The patient safety is one of the most important element to guarantee a good quality of healthcare and to satisfy the required standard. As shown in several recent studies, the technological development facilitated the growth and the diffusion of the simulation in healthcare education. In particular, many different serious games have been developed to educate medical professionals and to improve the learning of the medical procedures. In this paper we present the design of an educational game to train the medical students in order to deal with cardiology cases. A multidisciplinary methodology was adopted in order to make the medical knowledge, the biomedical technical skills and the mathematical approach converging. The serious game was designed to support the decision making process, formulated as an integer programming mathematical model that also evaluates the game performance. Moreover, the serious game was developed in a 3D environment and was implemented by Scrum framework

A meta-analysis of data collection in serious games research

Serious game analytics share many of the challenges of data analytics for computer systems involving human activity. Key challenges include how to collect data without influencing its generation, and more fundamentally, how to collect and validate data from humans where a primary emphasis is on what people are thinking and doing. This chapter presents a meta-analysis of data collection activities in serious games research. A systematic review was conducted to consider metrics and measures across the human–computer interaction, gaming, simulation, and virtual reality literature. The review focus was on the temporal aspect of data collection to identify if data is collected before, during, or after gameplay and if so what fundamental processes are used to collect data. The review found that the majority of data collection occurred post-game, then pre-game, and finally during gameplay. This reflects traditional difficulties of capturing gameplay data and highlights opportunities for new data capture approaches oriented towards data analytics. Also we identify how researchers gather data to answer fundamental questions about the efficacy of serious games and the design elements that might underlie their efficacy. We suggest that more standardized and better-validated data collection techniques, that allow comparing and contrasting outcomes between studies, would be beneficial