Gamification-based Behavioral Change in Children with Diabetes Mellitus

Abstract

Recently there has been a tremendous flowering of research in behavioural economics and in psychological and persuasive technology. This research helps designers to understand how children can change their behaviour and make the proper decisions in their lives. This paper aims to evaluate the behavioural change of children with diabetes mellitus in their daily lives after using a gamified health app designed and developed for this research. As proof of concept, the gamification was designed based on user experience by mapping the gamification mechanism to the user experience factors [1]. To perform it, the authors measured the changed behaviour based on performance, effectiveness, and efficiency that mapped to the gamification mechanism. A randomized controlled experiment was applied to measure the impact of gamification on children with diabetes. The researcher selected a random sample of 20 children with diabetes with the group between 6 to 12 years and then divided the sample randomly into two groups: a control group (A) consist of ten children and a treatment group (B) from another ten children. The results show that the treatment group of children who watched the video before playing the game have become more enthusiastic since they knew the idea of ​​the game and its purpose than the control group. This has automatically influenced their eating behaviour, and they tend to eat healthy food. The children became more cautious in their eating habits than the control group, and the game had a significant impact in changing their eating behaviours. Our future direction is to investigate more metrics definition based on GM and test the theoretical and empirical on real case study.