JMIR Serious Games

Unicompartmental knee arthroplasty (UKA) requires precise intraoperative coordination from operating room nurses. Conventional teaching may be insufficient for junior nurses learning complex UKA surgical cooperation, particularly regarding self-efficacy and cognitive demands. Serious games have emerged as a promising educational tool for nursing training.

Patients with chronic stroke commonly experience motor and cognitive impairments, with diminished quality of life. Their participation in rehabilitation is often limited by long travel distances and low motivation. Given the health benefits of multimodal exercise, with the accessibility and engagement offered by interactive exergames, delivering such interventions in a remote format may help overcome common barriers, and enhance health outcomes.

As a neurodegenerative disorder, Parkinson disease (PD) demonstrates significant prevalence worldwide. As the population ages, the number of patients with PD increases. Individuals with PD are susceptible to varying degrees of cognitive and psychological impairments. Virtual reality (VR)–based therapy is an emerging technology used for cognitive recovery and mental health treatment, yet controversy remains.

Exposure and response prevention is a first-line intervention for obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), yet many individuals with contamination concerns do not access care. Virtual reality exposure–based therapy (VRET) may improve scalability and acceptability.

Auditory discrimination training is widely used to supplement aural habilitation and rehabilitation in individuals with hearing or auditory challenges. Recently, gamification has been introduced as a strategy to enhance attention, motivation, and engagement during training. However, the relationship between user experience (UX) and auditory discrimination performance remains unclear. In addition, maintaining long-term interest in auditory training is still a challenge, particularly in younger populations, highlighting the need for more engaging and user-centered approaches.

Loneliness has been linked to reduced mental and physical health. The “loneliness epidemic” is recognized as a public health crisis. However, questions remain about the potential of video games, which people play by themselves, to help reduce perceived loneliness.

Serious games can be custom or noncustom, each offering advantages for rehabilitation. Custom serious games developed specifically for rehabilitation allow control over feedback and adjustment of game speed and difficulty. Alternatively, noncustom games do not offer these controls but provide attractive graphics, sounds, and engaging game mechanics. The differences between these systems may affect users’ exercise intensity, quality of movement, and experience during gameplay, which have implications for system and game selection in rehabilitation.

Recent advances in digital therapeutics (DTx) have led to the development of game-based, home-delivered interventions for children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Prior studies have demonstrated the feasibility and clinical potential of DTx for reducing ADHD symptoms but have primarily evaluated usage metrics, including training frequency and duration, which do not capture in-game performance or learning processes during training. In addition, the association between task difficulty regulation during DTx training and ADHD symptom improvement in children has not been well studied.

Serious games (SGs) have emerged as a promising tool in nursing education, providing interactive learning environments for clinical simulation, skill development, and feedback. These games enhance knowledge, clinical reasoning, and psychomotor skills. However, evidence on their effectiveness is dispersed across various platforms and outcome measures, making it difficult to derive clear guidelines for their integration into nursing curricula.

Craving is a diagnostic criterion and predictor of relapse in patients with alcohol dependence (AD) and is induced in cue exposure therapy (CET) to prepare patients for real-life risk situations. The benefits of virtual reality (VR) as an innovative tool within treatment for this highly prevalent disorder include increased practicability, standardization, and personalization of CET. Accurate measurement of craving is essential to develop effective virtual reality cue exposure (VR-CE) scenarios. Despite being relevant for diagnostics and therapy, the psychophysiological reaction to alcohol cues and its relationship to subjective craving has not been sufficiently examined.

Gamified teaching is considered an effective strategy for enhancing learning motivation. However, there is insufficient research on systematically designing theory-based gamified approaches for disaster nursing, particularly in resource-limited conventional classroom settings.

Planning deficits are a common and functionally significant executive function difficulty in children with autism, affecting everyday activities such as organizing tasks, prioritizing goals, and monitoring progress. Traditional neuropsychological assessments often lack ecological validity and may not capture these skills in real-world contexts. Serious games offer promising alternatives by simulating everyday scenarios and enabling observation of planning behaviors during interactive tasks. However, most existing systems focus on training rather than theory-driven assessment, and are rarely evaluated for usability before deployment with children with autism.