Research-derived guidelines for designing toddlers' healthcare games

Abstract

This paper presents the development of a set of research-derived design guidelines for healthcare games and applications for toddlers (children aged 1-3 years). An initial set of best practices was first developed through a workshop with experts; and afterwards, by employing an affinity diagram constructed by a HCI researchers' focus group, a revised set of best practices was obtained. This set of best practices was connected with gaming application design principles and translated into design guidelines. The results should be useful for designers and researchers who work with design and evaluation of healthcare games and applications for toddlers.

Therapeutic Serious Game Design Guidelines for Stimulating Cognitive Abilities of Children With Speech and Language Delay

“…(j) mobility is the ability to move or be moved freely and easily (Vasconcelos et al, 2012); (k) time management/restriction is the process of planning and controlling the amount of time spent (Tran & Subrahmanyam, 2013); (l) repetition and rehearsal of skills are the processes that facilitate repetitive actions (Høiseth et al, 2013;Lieberman et al, 2009); (m) motivation and engagement refer to the user's degree of attention, curiosity, interest, optimism and passion when using the game (Chiasson & Gutwin, 2005;Szczesna et al, 2012); (n) motor skill is the physical development that deals with the development of fine and gross motor skills as well as coordination (Chiasson & Gutwin, 2005;Hailpern et al, 2012); and (o) Cognitive development addresses the mental and intellectual growth of a child that may assist in the designing of technologies to extend the users' capabilities and compensate their weaknesses (Chiasson & Gutwin, 2005;Rogers et al, 2011). These categories can ease and help developers to plan and develop well-designed games.…”

Therapeutic Serious Game Design Guidelines for Stimulating Cognitive Abilities of Children With Speech and Language Delay

“…Nevertheless, studies conducted by Høiseth et al (2013) and Szczesna et al (2012) produced design guidelines for serious games specifically for children. Research done by Høiseth et al (2013), presented design guidelines for healthcare games and applications for toddlers (children aged 1-3 years) while Szczesna et al (2012) presented main guidelines for designing psychology serious games based on the cognitive behaviour techniques for pre-school children. Even though studies by Høiseth et al (2013) and Szczesna et al (2012) have produced design guidelines for serious games targeting children, the studies were not specifically for CSLD.…”

“…Research done by Høiseth et al (2013), presented design guidelines for healthcare games and applications for toddlers (children aged 1-3 years) while Szczesna et al (2012) presented main guidelines for designing psychology serious games based on the cognitive behaviour techniques for pre-school children. Even though studies by Høiseth et al (2013) and Szczesna et al (2012) have produced design guidelines for serious games targeting children, the studies were not specifically for CSLD. However, there is a study that produced a set of guidelines for children with speech delay but its main focus was on designing software to facilitate multisyllabic speech production (Hailpern, Harris, La Botz, Birman, & Karahalios, 2012).…”

Code Your Own Game: The Case of Children with Hearing Impairments

“…The technique is considered useful for identifying and analyzing issues in gathered data [11]. In order to investigate how the experts' advices and best practices could be specifically relevant for children, the content analysis connected those, with three central "design" components for children [7]: approach, settings and means.…”

“…In particular, based on [7] 1) approach category was defined as all the attitudes and acts that professionals should aim to perform in order to contribute to a successful workshop; 2) settings category includes all the preconditions that help children enroll with the workshop more willingly and 3) means category includes the best practices referring to the concrete needs methods and materials.…”