Santiago Hors-Fraile
Salumedia TecnologÃas, Spain
Title: Gamification for healthcare programs: Techniques, methods and cases to enhance the user experience and increase engagement
Biography
Biography: Santiago Hors-Fraile
Abstract
One of the biggest problems in the healthcare sector is the lack of user engagement in healthcare programs. These programs should help users to change their habits towards a healthier lifestyle but, unfortunately, they are not attractive enough on their own. The main reason for this lack of usage is that people rarely fully engage with the program because they are boring. For example in rehabilitation programs, treatments for chronic diseases, disease awareness platforms and learning tools for healthcare professionals we need to have an extra motivation to standout in the life of the user and become an everyday part of their lives. Usually, this extra motivation has been tried to achieve with gamification. However, there is a boom of emerging apps, devices and systems to monitor one’s health and most of them use ‘pointification’, which is a poor implementation of gamification and may lead to misunderstanding its effectiveness. In order to design a successful and engaging healthcare program, we have to consider multiple factors that will affect how users experience the system. In this presentation, we will go deeper in the needs of a well-designed gamified system, explaining the different types of users, the ways we have to motivate them and the different stages of mastery they should follow in the long term within any gamified healthcare program.