Designing healthcare games and applications for toddlers

Abstract

Healthcare games are becoming increasingly popular because of their potential to improve patients' wellbeing before, during, and after medical treatment. Even though young children (here referred to as toddlers) make up a growing group of gamers, there is a lack of research focusing on healthcare games for this group. Since toddlers often express unmotivated behavior towards receiving medical treatment, the potential of healthcare gaming applications for this group should be explored. The purpose of our study is to provide a set of research-derived design considerations for healthcare games and applications for toddlers. Our approach included an initial best practices collection through a workshop involving experts from pediatric healthcare and pedagogy, and an affinity diagramming categorization by a focus group with HCI and health researchers. This resulted in a robust set of best practices that was further used for establishing a connection with game components and transformation into design considerations. As an illustrating example we present a prototype of a healthcare game developed to improve nebulizer treatment for toddlers. The final result of this work is a set of key aspects to consider when designing healthcare games and applications for toddlers. The results should be useful for designers and researchers who work in the intersection between health and young user groups.

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