Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Research Protocols
Date Submitted: Dec 4, 2023
Open Peer Review Period: Dec 4, 2023 - Jan 30, 2024
Date Accepted: Feb 14, 2024
(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Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited.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.
KIJANI app to promote physical activity in children and adolescents – study protocol for a mixed method evaluation
ABSTRACT
Background:
Physical activity (PA) promotion should start early in childhood and adolescence. Digital approaches have the potential to make activity promotion attractive and age-appropriate for the target group. KIJANI is a mobile application approach to promote PA in children and adolescents via gamification and augmented reality.
Objective:
This study protocol describes the KIJANI intervention in detail, as well as the evaluation approach.
Methods:
KIJANI is based on the concept that virtual coins can be earned through PA e.g. in the form of collected step count. With these coins, in turn, blocks can be bought, which can be used to create virtual buildings and integrate them into the player’s real-world environment via augmented reality. KIJANI can be played at predefined play locations that were comprehensively identified as safe, child-friendly, and attractive for PA by the target group in a partner project. The evaluation process will be divided in two different stages. Phase-I-evaluation will be a mixed-methods approach with one-on-one semi-structured interviews and questionnaires to evaluate the user experience and receive feedback from the target group. After the implementation of results and feedback from the target group, phase-II-evaluation will proceed in the form of a two-arm randomized controlled trial in which the effectiveness of KIJANI will be assessed via objectively measured PA as well as questionnaires.
Results:
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Conclusions:
The study will help to determine the efficacy, applicability and user experience of a gamified activity promotion application in children and adolescents.
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.