Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Serious Games
Date Submitted: Jul 20, 2021
Date Accepted: Dec 3, 2021
Developing a health game to prepare pre-school children for anesthesia: A formative study using a child-centered approach
ABSTRACT
Background:
Every year, millions of children undergo medical procedures which require anesthesia. Fear and anxiety are common among young children undergoing such procedures and can interfere with the child’s recovery and wellbeing. Relaxation, distraction, and education are methods that can be used to prepare children and help them to cope with fear and anxiety and serious games may be a suitable medium for these purposes. User-centered design emphasizes the involvement of end-users during the development and testing of products, but involving young, pre-school children may be challenging.
Objective:
An objective of this study was to describe the development and usability of a computer-based educational health game intended for pre-school children to prepare them for upcoming anesthesia. A further objective was to describe the lessons learned from using a child-centered approach with the young target group.
Methods:
A formative mixed methods child (user)-centered study design was used to develop and test the usability of the game. Pre-school children (4-6 years-old) informed the game design through playful workshops (N=26) and usability testing was conducted through game-playing and interviews (N=16). Data were collected in Iceland and Finland with video-recorded direct observation and interviews, as well as children’s drawings and analyzed with content analysis and descriptive statistics.
Results:
The children shared their knowledge and ideas about hospitals, different emotions and their preferences concerning game elements. Testing revealed the high usability of the game and provided important information that was used to modify the game before publishing and that will be used in its further development.
Conclusions:
Pre-school children can inform game design through playful workshops about health-related subjects which they are not necessarily familiar with but that are relevant for them. The game’s usability was improved with the participation of the target group and is now ready for clinical testing.
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
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.