Gamification in Healthcare

Gamification in Healthcare

Historical Development of Gamification and its usages in some Business Models Used

Games, historically, can have serious connotations including military war games and mathematical or economic game theory. Serious games are games that try to solve real-world problems. Gamification is a relatively new term highly related to serious games. The basic idea of gamification is to engage players and solve real-world problems using game mechanics. Researchers in gamification are attempting to overcome the stigma that games, or at the very least, game mechanics, and work cannot overlap. Not only can they overlap, but the interplay between games and work can lead to more productive workers, more profitable businesses, and even be applied to solving large-scale problems such as the obesity epidemic. In fact, gamification has been around for centuries and is ever-present in society today. Consider a common problem that parents face when attempting to feed an unwilling child vegetables. A typical solution to this problem is to pretend a spoonful of vegetables is actually an airplane coming in for a landing in the airstrip, which in this case is actually the child ' s mouth.

Using computing to deliver education has a long history. The computer aided instruction (CAI) programs on the 1970s and 1980s pioneered rote learning and record keeping but were not arguably entertaining. Edutainment games, games that mix entertainment and education, including The Oregon Trail , Reader Rabbit , Math Blaster , and Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?, were introduced into classrooms in the 1980s and reached their height of popularity in the 1990s.

It has been two decades since that time. What happened to the edutainment industry? At the time these games were being developed, the budget for edutainment games was nearly the same as entertainment games, which is why blockbuster games could be created. But a chain reaction in price slashing resulted in educational software selling for prices only 10% of what it had originally cost, devastating the industry. Since that time, games like SimCity and Civilization have successfully mixed education and gaming but with the emphasis on fun. In SimCity players are tasked with creating and managing a city, including placing residential, commercial, and industrial buildings, placing roads and railways, managing an electrical grid, and dealing with natural disasters. Civilization has players develop empires throughout different ages, from an ancient era to future times; the primary tasks in the game involve exploration, diplomacy, and warfare. The lesson to learn is that gamification must be approached with a fun-first attitude where education is merely a byproduct of fun. Mixing education and fun can work. Third grade elementary teacher Ananth Pai recently introduced games in the classroom as a way of individualizing learning. Pai focuses on helping students understand broad concepts, while he uses games to provide a method of learning skills that adhere to an individual student ' s needs. According to researcher David Heistad, Pai's students are earning scores that show very high growth.

B.Applications of Gamification in Health Care

Patients and ...