Shahrestani Arash, Van Gorp Pieter, Le Blanc Pascale, Greidanus Fabrizio, de Groot Kristel, Leermakers Jelle
Annu Int Conf IEEE Eng Med Biol Soc. 2017 Jul;2017:4507-4511. doi: 10.1109/EMBC.2017.8037858.
There is a multitude of mHealth applications that aim to solve societal health problems by stimulating specific types of physical activities via gamification. However, physical health activities cover just one of the three World Health Organization (WHO) dimensions of health. This paper introduces the novel notion of Unified Health Gamification (UHG), which covers besides physical health also social and cognitive health and well-being. Instead of rewarding activities in the three WHO dimensions using different mHealth competitions, UHG combines the scores for such activities on unified leaderboards and lets people interact in social circles beyond personal interests. This approach is promising in corporate environments since UHG can connect the employees with intrinsic motivation for physical health with those who have quite different interests. In order to evaluate this approach, we realized an app prototype and we evaluated it in two corporate pilot studies. In total, eighteen pilot users participated voluntarily for six weeks. Half of the participants were recruited from an occupational health setting and the other half from a treatment setting. Our results suggest that the UHG principles are worth more investigation: various positive health effects were found based on a validated survey. The mean mental health improved significantly at one pilot location and at the level of individual pilot participants, multiple other effects were found to be significant: among others, significant mental health improvements were found for 28% of the participants. Most participants intended to use the app beyond the pilot, especially if it would be further developed.
有大量的移动健康应用程序旨在通过游戏化激发特定类型的体育活动来解决社会健康问题。然而，体育健康活动仅涵盖世界卫生组织（WHO）健康三大维度中的一个维度。本文引入了统一健康游戏化（UHG）这一全新概念，它除了涵盖身体健康外，还包括社会健康和认知健康与幸福。UHG并非使用不同的移动健康竞赛来奖励WHO三个维度中的活动，而是将这些活动的得分合并在统一的排行榜上，并让人们在超越个人兴趣的社交圈子中互动。这种方法在企业环境中很有前景，因为UHG可以将出于内在动力关注身体健康的员工与兴趣截然不同的员工联系起来。为了评估这种方法，我们实现了一个应用程序原型，并在两项企业试点研究中对其进行了评估。总共有18名试点用户自愿参与了为期六周的研究。一半的参与者是从职业健康环境中招募的，另一半是从治疗环境中招募的。我们的结果表明，UHG原则值得进一步研究：基于一项经过验证的调查发现了各种积极的健康影响。在一个试点地点，平均心理健康状况有显著改善，在个体试点参与者层面，还发现了其他多种显著影响：其中，28%的参与者心理健康有显著改善。大多数参与者打算在试点期之后继续使用该应用程序，特别是如果它能进一步开发的话。
