JMIR Serious Games

Complications due to dysphagia are increasingly prevalent among the elderly; however, the tediousness and complexity of conventional tongue rehabilitation treatments affect their willingness to rehabilitate. It is currently unclear whether integrating gameplay into a tongue training app is a feasible approach to rehabilitation.

Difficulties in emotional regulation are often observed in children and adolescents with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Innovative complementary treatments, such as video games and virtual reality, have become increasingly appealing to patients. The Secret Trail of Moon (MOON) is a serious video game developed by a multidisciplinary team featuring cognitive training exercises. In this second randomized clinical trial, we evaluated the impact of a 20-session treatment with MOON on emotional regulation, as measured by the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire.

This study evaluated the effectiveness of a virtual reality (VR) high-intensity interval training (HIIT) boxing protocol compared to traditional high-intensity circuit training (HICT) in improving exercise motivation, engagement, and physiological responses among thirty healthy medical students.

Reminiscence therapy through music is a psychosocial intervention with benefits for elderly patients with neurocognitive disorders. Therapies using virtual or augmented reality are efficient to ecologically assess, and eventually train, episodic memory in the elderly population. We designed a semi-immersive musical game called “A life in songs” which invites patients to immerse themselves in a past era through visuals and songs from that time period. The game aspires to become a playful, easy-to-use and complete tool for the assessment, rehabilitation and prevention of neurocognitive decline associated with aging.

With substantial resources allocated to develop virtual reality (VR)–based rehabilitation exercise programs for poststroke motor rehabilitation, it is important to understand how patients with stroke perceive these technology-driven approaches, as their perceptions can determine acceptance and adherence.

Words are a natural way to describe mental states in humans, while numerical values are a convenient and effective way to carry out quantitative psychological research. With the growing interest of researchers in gaming disorder, the number of screening tools is growing. However, they all require self-quantification of mental states. The rapid development of natural language processing creates an opportunity to supplement traditional rating scales with a question-based computational language assessment approach that gives a deeper understanding of the studied phenomenon without losing the rigor of quantitative data analysis.

For years, Mexico has reported the highest global incidence of school bullying, with approximately 19% of students going through some form of hostile peer interactions. Despite numerous interventions, these harmful conducts remain deeply entrenched in educational environments.

Many adolescents in Uganda are affected by common mental disorders, but only a few affordable treatment options are available. Digital mental health interventions offer promising opportunities to reduce these large treatment gaps, but interventions specifically tailored for Ugandan adolescents are limited.

Serious games (SG) have emerged as promising tools for cognitive training and therapeutic interventions, especially for enhancing executive functions. These games have demonstrated the potential to support individuals with diverse health conditions, including neurodevelopmental and cognitive disorders, through engaging and interactive experiences. However, a comprehensive understanding of the effectiveness of SG in enhancing executive functions is needed.

Chronic pain presents a significant treatment challenge, often leading to frustration for both patients and therapists due to the limitations of traditional methods. Research has shown that synchronous visuo-tactile stimulation, as used in the rubber hand experiment, can induce a sense of ownership over a fake body part and reduces pain perception when ownership of the fake body part is reported. The effect of the rubber hand experiment can be extended to the full body, e.g. during the full body illusion, using both visuo-tactile but also cardio-visual signals.

With climate change, the number of natural disasters is increasing globally, and the resulting weather-related events lead to increased loss of life and property. Meanwhile, the significance of disaster education is becoming increasingly important. Despite the events of disaster being hard to predict, people’s responses to such events can be improved by education and training. Gamification, an innovative teaching method, has demonstrated great potential across various fields, including disaster education.

Osteoarthritis is one of the most common degenerative diseases of the musculoskeletal system and can ultimately lead to the need for surgery, such as total knee or hip arthroplasty. Functional movement deficits can be a prognostic factor for osteoarthritis in the lower extremities. Thus, training physiological movement patterns may help in the treatment of such functional deficits. Motivation to exercise frequently is of utmost importance and can be promoted by using digital real-time feedback.