Abstract
Promoting a healthy sleep is a big challenge and becomes a strategic priority in public health, due to the severe consequences on children’s development and risk to psychiatric diseases. Interventions that promote healthy sleep, such as those that focus on the dissemination of behavioral and environmental recommendations of sleep hygiene with children, are presented as an alternative. Serious game design offers wide-reaching domains in health applications and is increasing in popularity, particularly with children and teens because of it’s potential to engage and motivate players differently from other interventions. This study aims to evaluate effects of serious game on sleep hygiene recommendations “Perfect Bedroom: learn to sleep well,” on sleep habits and sleep parameters of healthy children. This is an experimental, prospective and quantitative study. We will randomize children in experimental (n = 88) and no intervention groups (n = 88). The experiment has four stages (pre-intervention, intervention, post-intervention, and follow-up), which will count with participation of children and their parents/guardians. In the evaluation stages, the guardians will answer questionnaires and scales to assess sociodemographic and health data, sleep habits and sleep pattern of their child. The children themselves will answer the following: a scale to assess sleepiness levels, a questionnaire to evaluate the serious game and the game itself, will characterize their bedroom and the activities they perform before sleep, with strategies developed by researches. Intervention with experimental group conducted with the serious game “Perfect Bedroom” will happen twice a week, for 3 weeks in a row, resulting in six sessions of 50 min each. Inferential analysis will be conducted for comparisons between groups and intragroups to measure effect of intervention in primary outcomes (sleep habits) and secondary outcomes (sleep parameters). We expect that the intervention with this game can provide valuable evidence to a new approach in promoting healthy sleep habits, with applications in clinical, educational, and familiar settings, which could diminish future health issues and risk at psychiatric diseases, decreasing the social burden of treatments for these conditions in children.
Highlights
Sleep in children is a critical component for development and health, becoming an important call for action over the 21st century (Gruber et al, 2016)
Evaluation of Serious Game “Perfect Bedroom: Learn to Sleep Well” by Children For the purpose of allowing the children to evaluate the serious game, we developed a questionnaire with textual and graphics elements
During the stage of preintervention, questionnaires and scales will be applied to assess sociodemographic data, and characterize sleep habits and sleep pattern, by filling out the UNESP sleep habits and hygiene scale and sleep diary, besides giving the actiwatch to be wore by the children
Summary
Sleep in children is a critical component for development and health, becoming an important call for action over the 21st century (Gruber et al, 2016). Sleep health is a “multidimensional pattern of sleep-wakefulness that promote physical and mental well-being,” and it includes seven potential domains that are considered in literature as predictors of health outcomes: Duration (total of sleep obtained in 24 h), Continuity (ability of falling asleep and returning to sleep when waking up without necessity), Timing (the time of sleep within the 24-h), Sleepiness/Alertness (ability to maintain attentive wakefulness); Quality (subjective evaluation of “good“ or “poor” sleep); Regularity (consistency of sleep and wake times) and Rhythmicity (overall circadian rhythm pattern) (Buysse, 2014; Wallace et al, 2018) This concept could be applied for children based on prior scientific evidences of negative consequences of children not getting enough sleep and/or poor sleep quality, such as irregularity in sleep schedules (Mindell et al, 2009; Matricciani et al, 2012; Kelly et al, 2013; Buysse, 2014; Paruthi et al, 2016). This bi-directional association could be explained by: (1) influence of socioeconomic status (SES) in functionality and environment, (2) parenting style and psychological function of parents, and (3) correspondence of inadequate sleep habits between parents and their child (Bajoghli et al, 2013; UrferMaurer et al, 2017)
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