JMIR Serious Games

Falls cause injury and mortality among older adults, necessitating reliable, scalable, engaging balance assessment tools to use in community settings. Traditional clinician-administered assessments like the Brief Balance Evaluation Systems Test (Brief-BESTest) are limited by subjectivity and accessibility constraints. Computer vision–based digitalization combined with gamification may address these limitations; yet, validation evidence remains limited.

Chronic health conditions impose substantial financial and operational burdens on the public health sector and insurance providers in the United Kingdom. While gamification demonstrates the potential for enhancing health behavior, a structured analysis linking to established behavioral frameworks is missing. We provide a viewpoint on whether, as health and life insurers transition from traditional risk assessment toward proactive risk reduction strategies, gamification offers an innovative mechanism to strengthen their prevention initiatives and insurer-insured relationships. We examine how gamification aligns with key theoretical models, including the Behavior Change Wheel and Behavior Change Techniques, and how gamification elements can be mapped onto them. This enables combining multiple Behavior Change Techniques into effective interventions, which provide engaging user experiences and promote intrinsic motivation. We distinguish gamification from mere incentivization, highlighting its potential for sustained health outcomes. We also explore the ethical and practical considerations of gamification in the insurance sector. We highlight the need for a robust ethical framework that preserves an individual’s ability to make free and informed decisions, while ensuring inclusivity and absence of discrimination based on personal characteristics that may affect their capacity to engage in healthy behaviors. Similarly, we highlight how privacy, transparency, and accountability need to be prioritized in the governance structure of gamification programs in the sector. Our analysis emphasizes that gamification has the potential to represent the new panacea for the insurance sector, if effective gamified interventions incorporate inclusive design principles, theoretical grounding, ethical accountability, and continuous refinement to ensure alignment with long-term public and individual health objectives. This viewpoint is the first to map gamification and behavioral change frameworks into a unified model for insurer-led health behavior interventions and encourage greater investment in gamified wellness products and the use of theory-driven behavioral science in insurance-led digital health tools.

Serious games (SGs) are increasingly used to study and enhance team performance in organizational and educational settings. While prior research has explored leadership and communication as isolated factors, the multivariate interactions between behavioral indicators remain poorly understood. A deeper understanding of these relationships can reveal which behavioral and demographic factors most strongly predict successful outcomes, offering insights relevant to both scientific research and practical training design.

Serious games are increasingly recognized as effective tools in adolescent mental health interventions, providing engaging platforms for emotional regulation, skill development, and behavioral change. However, the ways in which core theoretical concepts such as transfer, boundary crossing, and models of reality are incorporated into serious game designs are not consistently described in the literature. Clarifying how these concepts are addressed is important for understanding how game-based learning may connect to real-world health care practice.

Virtual reality (VR) technology has been increasingly explored in stroke rehabilitation due to its immersive and interactive features. However, considerable heterogeneity exists in intervention designs, study populations, and outcome measures, limiting the feasibility of conducting a systematic review.

With rapid urbanization, the proliferation of densely arranged buildings and increasingly homogeneous architectural designs has made disorientation and navigation difficulties more common, especially for older adults. Meanwhile, advances in virtual reality technology now allow researchers to create highly immersive navigation games, offering opportunities for assessing cognitive abilities and examining how environmental factors shape navigation behavior.

As survival rates for children, adolescents, and young adults with cancer improve, managing treatment-related side effects is increasingly important. Enhancing physical activity levels has been shown to be effective in reducing some of these effects. Digital interventions, such as mobile apps, offer engaging tools to promote physical activity in young populations.

Gaming disorder (GD) is an emerging issue that leads to significant impairment, yet existing tools for measuring withdrawal symptoms in GD are limited and often fail to capture its multidimensional nature. Most current measures rely on single-item assessments or adapted tools from substance use disorders, overlooking cognitive, behavioral, and physiological components. A comprehensive, multidimensional questionnaire is needed to more accurately assess withdrawal in GD, aiding in early detection and intervention.

Acute traumatic musculoskeletal injuries often result in persistent pain and disability despite physical recovery. Virtual reality (VR) provides an innovative approach for overcoming treatment barriers and may help address psychological risk factors for persistent pain and disability. However, the neural mechanisms underlying VR, particularly in subacute orthopedic pain, are insufficiently understood.

Virtual reality (VR) has proven effective in delivering nonpharmacological interventions to reduce acute and chronic pain. For the treatment of nonspecific chronic low back pain (CLBP), it offers benefits over traditional treatment options, such as the possibility of gamified movement exercises with real-time performance feedback and virtual embodiment. We implemented a novel immersive VR intervention (a serious game) that combined these elements.

Physical activity plays a central role in the course and progression of chronic conditions in older adults. However, individuals within this population tend to have an inactive lifestyle. Exergaming, which is defined as the integration of physical activity with game-based elements, offers a promising approach to promote physical activity in individuals with chronic conditions. Despite its potential, limited evidence exists on how specific game elements influence behavioral and psychological outcomes in this population.

Dysphagia is a prevalent health issue affecting quality of life. Gamified swallowing exercises have the potential to enhance swallowing function and adherence in adults with dysphagia. Nevertheless, such evidence has not yet been systematically synthesized.