Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Serious Games
Date Submitted: Jan 22, 2019
Date Accepted: Dec 12, 2019
Health education serious games: A scoping review
ABSTRACT
Background:
Serious educational games have shown effectiveness in improving various outcomes in the health domain. Educational health games provide a risk-free environment to practice and learn high-stake tasks and experience unpredictable outcomes for various end users ranging from patients to clinical providers. Past reviews of health education games have often focused on specific diseases, certain medical subjects, fixed target groups, or limited outcomes of interest. Given the recent surge in educational health game studies, an updated overarching scoping review of health education games was needed to provide insight on various aspects of the recent developments of such serious games.
Objective:
Conduct a comprehensive scoping review on the design and evaluation of serious educational games for health.
Methods:
We followed the York framework for this review, and conducted the following steps: identifying the research question, finding the relevant studies, defining the search strategy, and collating information extracted from the studies to generate our results. We identified 1726 studies using a unique combination of keywords against PubMed and Science Direct databases. Total of 93 studies were included in this review after removing duplicates (n=55) and excluding studies not meeting our inclusion criteria (n=1420 based on title and abstract, and n=158 after reviewing the full text). We categorized the data extracted from these articles into general, design, and evaluation variables.
Results:
Majority of the health education games was developed and evaluated in developed countries of North America (~52%) and Europe (38%) with a surge of studies published since 2012. We discovered 62.4% of studies aiming to improve knowledge learning and 37.6% to enhance skill development. The reviewed studies targeted various categories of end users such as healthcare providers and managers (23.5%), patients (75.2%), and a mix of others. Only ~24% of the games were targeting a specific medical condition while a growing majority is targeting lifestyle behaviors and generic health issues (e.g. safety, nutrition). Among 51 studies reporting gameplay specifications, the most common gameplay duration was 15 to 30 minutes. Of the 28 studies reporting game repetition, only ~10% of the games allowed the users to play the game with unlimited repetitions. From 20 studies that measured follow-up duration after the game intervention, only one study reported a 2-year post-intervention follow up.
Conclusions:
Serious games are increasingly used for health education. This study offers an updated scoping review of the studies assessing the value of serious games in improving health education. Our findings indicate the need for health education game development and adoption in developing countries, focusing on multi-disciplinary team work in designing effective health education games, and further developing health games targeting general health topics that go beyond a specific medical condition.
Citation

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Copyright
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