JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Cognitive tasks are often repetitive and are often in a monotonous manner presented, which finally leads to participant boredom and disengagement. This, may cause high attrition rate, between-subjects variability, and, in turn, negatively impacts data quality and intervention effects. It is assumed that greater engagement and motivation will manifest data quality improvement. Gamification has been heralded as a potential mechanism for increasing participant engagement in cognitive tasks. Some studies have reported a positive effect of gamification on participant performance, although most have shown mixed results. One reason for these contrasting findings is that most studies have applied poorly and heterogeneous design techniques for gamifying cognitive assessment and training that in turn indicate the need for an appropriate gamification design framework in these tasks.

Objective:

This study aims to propose a preliminary design framework for gamifying cognitive training and testing.

Methods:

We employed a design science research approach to provide a framework for gamifying cognitive testing and training by synthesizing existing gamification design frameworks, gamification works in cognitive assessment and training, and incorporating in the field experiences, resulted to a gamification design framework. The prototypes of the framework were evaluated with relevant experts iteratively.

Results:

We proposed a six step framework to guide the designing of gamification in cognitive testing/ training. The steps include: objectives determination, knowing the users and context of gamification, gamification technique selection, iterative prototyping and playtesting, creating applicable models, and monitoring.

Conclusions:

We found that: (1) an intermediate design framework is needed for gamifying cognitive testing/ training means that designers should select game elements by considering current cognitive testing/ training relevant characteristics otherwise risks like irrelevant cognitive load and hawthorne-like effects may jeopardize data quality, (2) in addition of developing a new gamified testing/ training tool from the scratch, two gamification techniques are widely used: first, adding game elements to a cognitive task, and second, mapping an existing game to a cognitive function/ test, and (3) further research is required to investigate the interplay of cognitive processes and game mechanics and how they should be designed/ implemented from the cognitive testing/ training and engagement perspectives.