Preface for the special issue on fun and engaging computing technologies for health

Preface for the special issue on fun and engaging computing technologies for health

Entertainment Computing 15 (2016) 41–42 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Entertainment Computing journal homepage: ees.elsevier.com/entcom ...

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Entertainment Computing 15 (2016) 41–42

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Entertainment Computing journal homepage: ees.elsevier.com/entcom

Editorial

Preface for the special issue on fun and engaging computing technologies for health Healthcare technologies have changed significantly in the last few years. Most notably, technology migrated from the medical and institutionalized settings to the home and everyday life [1]. Medical care was replaced with self-care, nurses with untrained patients and caregivers, the organized ward with the cluttered home, and the medical condition – previously the main focus of concern – turned into one of the competing aspects to consider when defining the healthcare pathway. In this context, designing healthcare technologies became increasingly complex [2] and low levels of uptake and use are observed [3]. In order to promote the sustained use of healthcare technology, researchers and designers explored the potential of employing playful strategies in the health domain. Serious games, gamification, and other playful and engaging approaches have been used to make healthcare a more playful activity [4,5] for all users from mainstream to children [6–10], teenagers [11–13], and older adults [14]. As a result, these playful and engaging strategies have been applied to a diversity of conditions including dementia [15] to cancer [13], bipolar disease [16], diabetes [10,12,17], cerebral palsy [6,7], phobias [18], Parkinson’s disease [19], and down syndrome [9] and a diversity of purposes, such as: prevention [20], rehabilitation [19,21], or education for health-related issues [8,11]. Despite the wealth of important work published thus far, the research community is only now giving its first steps towards understanding how to best integrate playful strategies with healthcare technologies. For example, while there are studies establishing a positive relationship between video game play and well being [21], there are others raising concerns about reducing the health condition to a game [2]. From a different perspective, there is anecdotal evidence that playful strategies can sustain engagement over time, however it is not easy to find studies which objectively show this advantage after a long-term evaluation. And on top of all these challenges, there is a dearth of frameworks to guide the design and development of playful technologies for healthcare. This special issue appears in the sequence of a workshop that was set up with the goal to discuss some of the issues raised above: the Workshop on Designing Systems for Health and Entertainment: what are we missing?1, held in Funchal, Madeira (Portugal) on November 11th 2014, as part of the International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology. During the workshop participants presented their position papers and highlighted their perspectives on the challenges of developing playful healthcare technologies. The discussion that followed showed that there are 1 Workshop details can be found at https://designingsystemsforhealthandentertainment.wordpress.com/call-for-papers/.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.entcom.2016.05.001 1875-9521/Ó 2016 Published by Elsevier B.V.

indeed multiple practical challenges, such as ensuring continued engagement, promoting actual behavior change, and finding appropriate ways of evaluating and validating these types of technologies. This special issue invited extended contributions from the authors of the Workshop, as well as from the overall HCI community, through an open call for papers. The special issue received seven manuscripts from a diversity of countries, namely: Australia, Austria, Brazil, Italy, Iraq, New Zealand, and the United States of America. The peer-reviewed process consisted of three rounds of reviewing involving two reviewers and one meta-reviewer. After the three rounds, two research articles were accepted based on their technical quality, maturity, and alignment with the objectives of the special issue. The acceptance rate was 28%. The first manuscript [22] describes the process of iterative design and development of a community-based serious game for disease prevention and management. The game focuses specifically on two related neglected and emerging infectious tropical diseases – Visceral Leishmaniasis (VL) and American Cutaneous Leishmaniasis (ACL) – and was the outcome of a collaboration between the game designers and a team of subject matter practitioners and researchers working in the field. Based on the reflection on the methodology followed and the findings of an expert study conducted to gather feedback, a contribution is made towards informing the design of similar health-related serious games. The second article [23] also reports on the development of a serious game, in this case, designed for children who underwent stem-cell transplantation. Children who undergo these procedures are at risk of developing a number of different health issues, so in order to account for these, clinicians usually ask them to fill in daily diaries with information such as their level of pain. However, such diaries have very low completion rates. To address this issue, the authors conducted a survey and engaged in explorative design sessions and facilitated a number of participatory design sessions with children. Drawing on their fieldwork, the authors designed a serious game where children explore an island and receive points for self-reporting medical data. The paper contributes with a detailed description of how children were involved in the design process, and its contribution can serve as inspiration to others designing games for a similar audience and purpose. Both manuscripts acknowledged the risk of technology abandonment over time and the increased challenge of securing continued engagement. In an effort to retain users engagement with the technology, the authors of both manuscripts committed themselves to employing methodologies that would actively involve the users in the design process. This would allow for the design of a product suited for the specific needs of its intended users

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Editorial / Entertainment Computing 15 (2016) 41–42

and therefore was more likely to retain their continued engagement. The work reported in these articles is useful to other researchers and practitioners developing serious games and playful technologies within the healthcare domain and targeting specific audiences. As mentioned earlier in this preface, there is still a number of unpaved avenues of research and work ahead for researchers integrating playful interactions into healthcare technologies. Nevertheless, these articles provide good examples of how to involve users in the design and, through that process, uncover their game practices and specific preferences in order to better cater for them in the design. Acknowledgments We would like to thank all the reviewers for their extensive and constructive comments that enable authors to improve their work during the two stage review process. In particular, we are grateful to: Alan Dix, Anne-Marie Mann, Christiane Moser, Conor Linehan, Cristina Sylla, David England, Esteban Clua, Fares Kayali, Florian Floyd Mueller, Greg Walsh, Janet Read, Jayden Garner, Madeline Balaam, Mads Frost, Mads Mller Jensen, Monica Tentori, Nervo Verdezoto, Sergi Bermdez i Badia, and Tilde Bekker. References [1] G. Fitzpatrick, New challenges for health it – design fit for life, in: Conference on Design 4 Health 2011 Sheffield, 13–15th July 2011, pp. 121–135. [2] F. Nunes, N. Verdezoto, G. Fitzpatrick, M. Kyng, E. Gronvall, C. Storni, Self-care technologies in HCI: trends, tensions, and opportunities, ACM Trans. Comput. Hum. Interact. 22 (2015) 33:1–33:45. [3] G. Fitzpatrick, A. Huldtgren, L. Malmborg, D. Harley, W. Ijsselsteijn, Design for agency, adaptivity and reciprocity: reimagining AAL and telecare agendas, in: V. Wulf, K. Schmidt, D. Randall (Eds.), Designing Socially Embedded Technologies in the Real-World, Computer Supported Cooperative Work, Springer, London, 2015, pp. 305–338. [4] S. Deterding, D. Dixon, R. Khaled, L. Nacke, From game design elements to gamefulness: defining ‘‘gamification”, in: Proceedings of the 15th International Academic MindTrek Conference: Envisioning Future Media Environments, MindTrek ‘11, ACM, 2011, pp. 9–15. [5] S. McCallum, Gamification and serious games for personalized health, Stud. Health Technol. Inform. 177 (2012) 85–96. [6] R. Delden, P. Aarts, B. Dijk, Entertainment Computing – ICEC 2012: 11th International Conference, ICEC 2012, Bremen, Germany, September 26–29, 2012. Proceedings, Springer, Berlin Heidelberg, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp. 221– 234. [7] M. Henschke, D. Hobbs, B. Wilkinson, Developing serious games for children with cerebral palsy: case study and pilot trial, in: Proceedings of the 24th Australian Computer–Human Interaction Conference, OzCHI ‘12, ACM, 2012, pp. 212–221. [8] S. Tranquada, M. Chen, Y. Chisik, Hospital hero: a game for reducing stress and anxiety of hospitalized children in emergency room, in: Proceeding of the 10th International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment – vol. 8253, ACE 2013, Springer-Verlag, New York Inc, 2013, pp. 638–641. [9] A. Brandão, L. Brandão, G. Nascimento, B. Moreira, C.N. Vasconcelos, E. Clua, Jecripe: Stimulating cognitive abilities of children with down syndrome in prescholar age using a game approach, in: Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology, ACE ‘10, ACM, 2010, pp. 15–18. [10] H. Kharrazi, A. Faiola, J. Defazio, Human–Computer Interaction. Interacting in Various Application Domains: 13th International Conference, HCI

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Paula Alexandra Silva Department of Design Innovation, National University of Ireland, Maynooth, Maynooth, Ireland Francisco Nunes Human Computer Interaction Group, Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, Austria