JMIR Serious Games

Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is often a precursor of dementia, and patients with MCI develop dementia at a higher rate than healthy older adults. Early detection of cognitive decline at the MCI stage supports better planning of care and interventions. At present, the use of virtual reality (VR) in screening for MCI in older adults is promising, but there is little evidence regarding the use of virtual supermarkets to screen for MCI.

Games for health are a promising approach to health promotion. Their success depends on achieving both experiential (game) and instrumental (health) objectives. There is little to guide game for health (G4H) designers in integrating the science of behavior change with the art of game design.

Research into the application of virtual reality technology in the health care sector has rapidly increased, resulting in a large body of research that is difficult to keep up with.

While there has been increasing interest in the use of gamification in mental health care, there is a lack of design knowledge on how elements from games could be integrated into existing therapeutic treatment activities in a manner that is balanced and effective. To help address this issue, we propose a design process framework to support the development of mental health gamification. Based on the concept of experienced game versus therapy worlds, we highlight 4 different therapeutic components that could be gamified to increase user engagement. By means of a Dual-Loop model, designers can balance the therapeutic and game design components and design the core elements of a mental health care gamification. To support the proposed framework, 4 cases of game design in mental health care (eg, therapeutic protocols for addiction, anxiety, and low self-esteem) are presented.

The common-sense model of illness suggests that mental representations of health threats may affect one’s behavioral reactions to them and health status. Internet gaming disorder is a newly defined mental disorder. Illness representations of internet gaming disorder may affect one’s risk of internet gaming disorder. In turn, symptoms of internet gaming disorder may affect one’s perceptions of the disorder.

Video games are expanding exponentially with their increased popularity among users. However, this popularity has also led to an increase in reported video game addiction. There may be consumer engagement–related factors that may influence video game addiction.

Lassitude and a rather high degree of mistrust toward the authorities can make regular or overly constraining COVID-19 infection prevention and control campaigns inefficient and even counterproductive. Serious games provide an original, engaging, and potentially effective way of disseminating COVID-19 infection prevention and control guidelines. Escape COVID-19 is a serious game for teaching COVID-19 infection prevention and control practices that has previously been validated in a population of nursing home personnel.

In neuropsychology, fully immersive virtual reality (VR) has been spotlighted as a promising tool. It is considered that VR not only overcomes the existing limitation of neuropsychological tests but is also appropriate for treating executive functions (EFs) within activities of daily living (ADL) due to its high ecological validity. While fully immersive VR offers new possibilities of neuropsychological tests, there are few studies that overview the intellectual landscape and academic trends in the research related to mainly targeted EFs with fully immersive VR.

Multidisciplinary collaboration is essential to the successful development of serious games, albeit difficult to achieve. In a previous study, the co.LAB serious game design framework was created to support collaboration within serious game multidisciplinary design teams. Its use has not yet been validated in a real usage context.

A serious game–based cellphone augmented reality system (CARS) was developed for rehabilitation of stroke survivors, which is portable, convenient, and suitable for self-training.

Learning through a 360° virtual reality (VR) or 2D video represents an alternative way to learn a complex medical education task. However, there is currently no consensus on how best to assess the effects of different learning materials on cognitive load estimates, heart rate variability (HRV), outcomes, and experience in learning history taking and physical examination (H&P) skills.

In recent years, there has been an increase in the number of students with depression, anxiety, and perceived stress. A solution that has been increasingly used for improving health and well-being is exergaming. The effects and acceptability of exergames have been studied widely but mostly with older adults. The feasibility and usability of exergames among university students, especially those of immersive virtual reality (iVR) exergames, remain unexplored.