Gamification of a Healthcare Application for People with Cognitive Impairments - A pre-exploration of gamification for medical adherence

Sammanfattning

Healthcare applications and assistive technology have become more popular in recent years, most of them have a simplified interface that cannot adapt to the cognitive alterations of the user over time. Even though gamification can enhance userengagement, especially with personalised and adaptive interfaces, few applicationsimplement these features, and those that do fail to maintain engagement over time.In order to figure out why, we researched in what ways gamification in healthcarecan aid in maintaining or enhancing the cognitive ability of people diagnosed withmental impairment conditions, with a focus on medical adherence. We conductedquantitative studies in the form of an online survey, before developing a prototypebased on our findings in both literature and the survey, and having a select numberof people test it both short-term and long-term. Our pre-prototype survey showedthat users would prefer an immersion-oriented approach in gamification of healthcare apps, a result that was reflected in both the short-term and long-term testing,as both groups would prefer more interaction with the virtual companion we implemented in the prototype. Furthermore, the data we gathered from the long-termtesters showed both a high engagement rate and a high medical adherence rate.Whilst these findings show promise in the implementation of gamification of healthcare apps, further tests should be conducted to confirm this, as both the sample sizeand duration of the tests can be considered inadequate.