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

Abstract

Healthcare applications and assistive technology have become more popular in re cent 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 user engagement, especially with personalised and adaptive interfaces, few applications implement 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 healthcare can aid in maintaining or enhancing the cognitive ability of people diagnosed with mental impairment conditions, with a focus on medical adherence. We conducted quantitative studies in the form of an online survey, before developing a prototype based on our findings in both literature and the survey, and having a select number of people test it both short-term and long-term. Our pre-prototype survey showed that users would prefer an immersion-oriented approach in gamification of health care 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-term testers showed both a high engagement rate and a high medical adherence rate. Whilst these findings show promise in the implementation of gamification of health care apps, further tests should be conducted to confirm this, as both the sample size and duration of the tests can be considered inadequate.