Abstract
The immune system of human beings plays a pivotal role in guarding against different types of diseases. During the COVID-19 pandemic, people with weak immune systems were more likely to die. Regular physical activities and healthy food intake can significantly improve the immune system; however, people with a sedentary lifestyle and a busy job schedule find it challenging and tedious to maintain regularity. Different approaches have been used over the years to engage people in various physical activities and improve their mental and physical health. The concept of employing serious games (games whose primary purpose is not fun or entertainment, but a serious goal) to effectuate better results has become one of the popular choices among healthcare professionals and research communities. Internet of things (IoT) has enabled digital transformation with smart cities, smart infrastructure, and the fourth industrial revolution. There have been some relevant studies on the encouragement of serious games in healthcare in the past few years. However, few research studies encourage IoT-enabled serious games played with IoT devices (sensors and actuators) by making the game experience more ubiquitous and pervasive. Consequently, the adaptation of the IoT in serious games for healthcare applications is a massive gap despite its growing need in an era significantly affected by COVID-19. This paper discusses the possibilities of integrating serious games with IoT and discusses the standard architecture, core technologies, and possible challenges. Finally, we present a prototype architecture and its various components and a qualitative analysis with recent studies.
Highlights
Games have become an integral part of human life, for entertainment and to help understand and learn serious jobs, such as education, strategic planning, and physical training
Serious games refer to the category of games in which the focus is tilted more towards strategies and learning rather than mere entertainment [1]
The gameplay in conventional serious games was based on underlying knowledge, which would often come from surveys and questionnaires [5] or based on their previous experience
Summary
Games have become an integral part of human life, for entertainment and to help understand and learn serious jobs, such as education, strategic planning, and physical training. Serious games have proven to be remarkably productive as a learning tool in many domains, such as engineering, healthcare, physics, and history [2–4], and in playfully achieving a particular job. The gameplay in conventional serious games was based on underlying knowledge, which would often come from surveys and questionnaires [5] or based on their previous experience. Such static data posed different challenges in terms of consistencies and accuracy, and future research encouraged the contextual data from sensing devices as a possible alternative. Internet of things (IoT) [6–9] is the realization of a vision where everything in the real world would interconnect and make smart decisions [10]
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