Design and Evaluation of a Pervasive Coaching and Gamification Platform for Young Diabetes Patients

Randy Klaassen, Kim Bul, Rieks op den Akker, Gert-Jan van der Burg, Pamela Kato, Pierpaulo di Bitonto

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

    46 Citations (Scopus)
    135 Downloads (Pure)

    Abstract

    Self monitoring, personal goal-setting and coaching, education and social support are strategies to help patients with chronic conditions in their daily care. Various tools have been developed, e.g., mobile digital coaching systems connected with wearable sensors, serious games and patient web portals to personal health records, that aim to support patients with chronic conditions and their caregivers in realizing the ideal of self-management. We describe a platform that integrates these tools to support young patients in diabetes self-management through educational game playing, monitoring and motivational feedback. We describe the design of the platform referring to principles from healthcare, persuasive system design and serious game design. The virtual coach is a game guide that can also provide personalized feedback about the user’s daily care related activities which have value for making progress in the game world. User evaluations with patients under pediatric supervision revealed that the use of mobile technology in combination with web-based elements is feasible but some assumptions made about how users would connect to the platform were not satisfied in reality, resulting in less than optimal user experiences. We discuss challenges with suggestions for further development of integrated pervasive coaching and gamification platforms in medical practice.

    Publisher Statement: This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
    Original languageEnglish
    Pages (from-to)402-429
    Number of pages28
    JournalSensors
    Volume18
    Issue number2
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 30 Jan 2018

    Bibliographical note

    This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

    Keywords

    • digital coaching
    • diabetes education
    • serious gaming;
    • digital coaself-management
    • user evaluations

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