Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Serious Games
Date Submitted: Oct 11, 2019
Date Accepted: Jun 11, 2020
Design and evaluation of a serious game to educate on choking
ABSTRACT
Background:
Choking is one of the causes of unintentional injury death. Prevention and knowledge of the first-aid procedure that has to be applied in case of choking can increase the chances of survival for choking victims. Serious games can be a good channel to educate on this topic.
Objective:
Our objective is to present and evaluate the effectives of a serious game designed to prevent choking and promote the first-aid procedure to be applied.
Methods:
A game that reproduces the main steps of the first-aid choking protocol as a set of mini-games is presented. In the proposed game, the player acquires the role of a helper who has to save the victim of a choking emergency by applying the main steps of the protocol. Time and score restrictions are imposed to pass each mini- game. To test the game, a pilot study with 48 high school students has been carried out. Different tests to assess subjects preferences and their knowledge on the topic have been performed before and after playing the proposed game. The obtained results have been analyzed using U Mann-Whitney test, when a grade variable was involved, and Fisher exact test, when we have two categorical variables.
Results:
The analysis performed showed that players enjoyed the game. No statistical differences were detected when considering the gender of the player, their preferences for games or their previous experience on choking emergencies. Comparing their knowledge before and after playing the game we detected that all indicators of the knowledge about how to act in case of a choking emergency have improved.
Conclusions:
The proposed game is a good strategy to promote and teach first-aid procedures on choking emergencies to non-experts on the topic.
Citation
Per the author's request the PDF is not available.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.