Currently submitted to: JMIR Serious Games
Date Submitted: Feb 3, 2026
Open Peer Review Period: Feb 3, 2026 - Mar 31, 2026
(currently open for review)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited.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.
Design, Implementation and Evaluation of Game-Based vs Non-Game-Based Tonal Auditory Discrimination Training Systems
ABSTRACT
Background:
Auditory discrimination training is widely used to supplement aural habilitation and rehabilitation in individuals with hearing or auditory challenges. Recently, gamification has been introduced to enhance attention and engagement during training
Objective:
In this study, we developed and compared two pure-tone auditory discrimination training systems: a game-based system with dual-task gamified activities and a non-game-based control system with identical auditory tasks but without gamified elements.
Methods:
A three-stage process (design, implementation, and evaluation) yielded beta versions of both systems. In the evaluation stage, eleven young adults (18–30 years) completed usability, user experience, and engagement questionnaires after using each system. Behavioral performance was assessed through mean response time, proportion of correct responses, Weber fraction, the Inverse Efficiency Score, and a novel Auditory Discrimination Performance Index.
Results:
The game-based system produced significantly higher scores in focused attention, aesthetic appeal, reward, attractiveness, stimulation, and novelty questionnaires’ perceived domains while no significant differences were found in most of auditory discrimination performance metrics.
Conclusions:
These findings suggest that gamification can substantially improve user experience and engagement without degrading short-term discrimination performance. Longitudinal studies are needed to determine whether these experiential advantages translate into long-term auditory training benefits and how sound features may improve performance in other auditory tasks.
Citation
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Copyright
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