Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Serious Games
Date Submitted: Mar 29, 2022
Open Peer Review Period: Mar 20, 2022 - May 15, 2022
Date Accepted: Oct 11, 2022
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Application of gamification principles and design therapeutic movement sequences to develop an interactive physical activity game
ABSTRACT
Background:
Depression is a severe illness that has accelerated with the spread of COVID-19 and associated lockdowns. As a result, reported physical activity has substantially decreased, further increasing depressive symptoms.
Objective:
We aimed to explain the use of gamification principles to develop content for an interactive physical activity game for depression based on clinically proven depression diagnostic criteria.
Methods:
In the first part, we discuss related work in this field, the game design framework, the users’ depression severity, how we customize the contents accordingly, the gradual progression of the game to match exercise principles, and user flow optimization.
Results:
In this section, we provide a brief description of each of the games developed, including instructions on how to play and design aspects for flow, audio, and visual feedback methods. Interactive physical activity-based games stimulate certain physical fitness factors such as improving reaction time, endurance, cardiovascular fitness, and flexibility. Additionally, the game difficulty progresses based on various factors, such as the user’s performance for successful completion, reaction time, movement speed, and stimulated larger joint range of motions. Cognitive aspects are included, as the user has to memorize particular movement sequences.
Conclusions:
Mental health issues are linked to behavior and movement; therefore, future physical activity-based interactive games may provide excellent stimulation for inducing user flow, while physical activity can help train various physical fitness factors linked to depression. Clinical Trial: This study did not include clinical trials.
Citation
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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.