A Gamification Model to Encourage Positive Healthcare Behaviours in Young People with Long Term Conditions

Abstract

Young people living with long term conditions will eventually have to transfer their care to the adult setting. Failure to plan and coordinate this has been associated with poorer health outcomes and disruption to their care. Transition planning encourages both health literacy and health promoting behaviours in an age and developmentally appropriate way. In order to gauge the attainment of these skills the Birmingham Children's Hospital Adolescent Rheumatology Team (UK) have developed a series of transitional care checklists. This paper focuses on discussing how the application of gamification (using game mechanics in non-game contexts) to these checklists could improve the engagement of young people in managing their self-care and provide a mechanism for doctors to quantifying the acquisition of these skills.

The Application of Anthropomorphic Gamification within Transitional Healthcare: A conceptual framework

“…It is anticipated that when people are motivated, it will make them want to follow the given instruction or change their habit according to the situation. Thus, a similar situation is expected to happen in the transitional healthcare where by playing games, patient's engagement to learn about themselves can be improved (Wilson & McDonagh, 2014). As proposed by Deterding (2012) and Hamari et al (2014), the implementation of game elements should be considered in tandem with the motivational aspects.…”

“…To maintain the patient's motivation while in the transition process and to support the process itself, an additional tool is required (Kralik, Visentin, & Van Loon, 2006;Marape, 2013). An involvement of technology, games in particular, could increase user motivation and improve user engagement throughout the process (Wilson & McDonagh, 2014). Therefore, a further suggestion is made to implement anthropomorphic gamification for the transitional health process.…”

“…Players collect points while exercising, get badges on achievement, and share their achievements with friends (through the leaderboard). However, as gamification grows, many pieces of research of gamification in healthcare (such as Hall, Glanz, Caton, & Weinhardt, 2013;King, Greaves, Exeter, & Darzi, 2013;Wilson & McDonagh, 2014) focus more about conceptualizing the gamification application. More empirical testing should be conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of using a gamified application.…”

“…Considering a gamification application for transitional healthcare, one recent study conducted by Wilson & McDonagh (2014) had proposed a conceptual gamification model to motivate the patient to go through their transition process. In their model, a few game elements were proposed, including points, trophies, badges, leaderboards and levels.…”

“…Applying N. Mohd Tuah, A. Ranchhod, G. B. Wills 2 behaviour towards one's health routine (Baranowski, Buday, Thompson, & Baranowski, 2008). Offering a game-like tool for the transition process could possibly motivate the users to self-manage his/her own condition, and thus could sustain their engagement in the transition process (Wilson & McDonagh, 2014).…”