No abstract

Background: Despite the variety of available treatments for mental health symptoms, many individuals do not engage with treatment and among those who do, dropout rates are often high. Therefore, providing alternative opportunities to access treatment is imperative. Research interest in the therapeutic effects of digital mental health initiatives and serious games has grown in recent years, but the potential of simple, easy-to-use casual videogames (CVGs) that can be played in short bursts of time has seldom been considered. Objective: The objective of the present study is to provide a systematic review of the literature examining the effects of CVGs on treating anxiety, depression, stress, and low mood. Method: A systematic search was conducted, using the terms (casual gam* or casual videogam* or mini gam* or minigam* or mini-gam* or gamif*) and (mental health or anx* or depress* or stress or mood) and (study or trial or treatment or prescribed or prevention) as ''Title,'' ''Abstracts,'' ''Keywords,'' or ''Topic'' words across all years. A Google search was also completed to check for articles that may have been missed. Results: N = 13 studies met inclusion criteria (no studies were added via the Google search). These studies reported findings for nine different CVGs, with six studies aimed at reducing anxiety, two examining effects for depression, and four investigating the effects of CVGs on treating stress or low mood. Promising effects were identified. Conclusion: CVGs may have promise for treating anxiety, depression, stress, and low mood.

Serious games for dementia (SG4D) hold their own, unique and significant space within the Games for Health domain. However, the SG4D field still has not been fully mapped out and classified. In this work, we present a generic taxonomy of serious games for dementia, based on the health functions and the health purposes they serve. Firstly, we classify dementia games based on the health function they serve, in: cognitive, physical and social-emotional games. Each of these functions serves a variety of health purposes, leading us to a second, lower level of classification in: preventative, rehabilitative, assessing and educative games. Furthermore, we provide an ex-post evaluation of the proposed taxonomy by exploring whether the existing serious games for dementia can be validly classified, based on the proposed taxonomic characters. To this end, we collect and analyse a set of dementia-related serious games (e.g. WiiSports, Big Brain Academy, Cognifit, MinWii, et al.) by performing a literature review. The results show that the taxonomical system covers a sub-field of "games for health" and indicates areas which are under-explored by current games. KeywordsAlzheimer's disease; dementia; mild cognitive impairment; serious games; taxonomy; IntroductionVideo games can be developed for the purpose of changing player's attitudes and behaviours, being both an expressive and a persuasive medium [3,14]. With a persuasive strategy in consideration, for purposes other than pure entertainment, the long existing field of "serious games" has found broad application in the video games industry, attempting to educate, train, and inspire the players [28,32,36].One of the key areas of application of serious games is the health domain, targeting changes in health-related behaviours. Games for Health (G4H) provide opportu-

Previously, we showed that 3% (31/1032)of asymptomatic healthcare workers (HCWs) from a large teaching hospital in Cambridge, UK, tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 in April 2020. About 15% (26/169) HCWs with symptoms of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) also tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 (Rivett et al., 2020). Here, we show that the proportion of both asymptomatic and symptomatic HCWs testing positive for SARS-CoV-2 rapidly declined to near-zero between 25th April and 24th May 2020, corresponding to a decline in patient admissions with COVID-19 during the ongoing UK ‘lockdown’. These data demonstrate how infection prevention and control measures including staff testing may help prevent hospitals from becoming independent ‘hubs’ of SARS-CoV-2 transmission, and illustrate how, with appropriate precautions, organizations in other sectors may be able to resume on-site work safely.

No abstract