Serious Game Scores as Health Condition
Indicator for Cancer Patients
Konrad PETERS
a,1
, Fares Kayali
b
, Andrea Reithofer
b
, Rebecca Wölfle
a
,
Ruth Mateus-Berr
b
, Jens Kuczwara
b
, Zsuzsanna Lehner
c
, Anita Lawitschka
c
,
Barbara Brunmaier
c
, Daniel Martinek
a
, Marisa Silbernagl
d
, Helmut Hlavacs
a
a
University of Vienna, Faculty of Computer Science, Research Group Entertainment
Computing, Vienna, Austria
b
University of Applied Arts, Vienna, Austria
c
St. Anna Children’s Hospital, Vienna, Austria
d
University of Vienna, Clinical Child Psychology, Vienna, Austria
Abstract. In this paper we present INTERACCT (Integrating Entertainment and
Reaction Assessment into Child Cancer Therapy), a multidisciplinary research
project aiming at creating a communication tool for pediatric patients after cancer
treatment with HSCT (hematopoietic stem cell transplantation) in after care. The
communication platform should foster communication between patients and
clinicians, but also increase motivation for treatment compliance by using
appropriate designs and gamification elements. A state of the art web interface
enables the physicians to evaluate data submitted by the patients, joining data from
various sources (lab data, survey data, physiotherapy performance) using HL7 and
visualizing imporant changes. This contribution outlines the challenges of
designing such a system and presents a solution for the medical data interface and
evaluation.
Keywords: data standards; serious games for health; children
Introduction
Related Work and Literature Background
Health related computer games have been intensively researched in the near past,
covering all kinds of desired positive aspects including education for coping with
health problems, keeping up motivation when going through difficult times,
strengthening treatment compliance, up to supporting therapy through physical
exercises [1]. An important subgroup in this field are children and adolescents with any
form of cancer, and since 2008 more and more game and multimedia projects for this
particular group have been developed. Re-Mission and its successor Re-Mission 2
2
are
computer games specifically tailored to be played by children during and after cancer
therapy. In a large randomized study the positive effect of playing Re-Mission on
motivation and compliance of pediatric patients has been proven [2]. The game
1
konrad.peters@univie.ac.at
2
http://www.re-mission2.org/ (accessed July 21st 2014)
Digital Healthcare Empowering Europeans
R. Cornet et al. (Eds.)
© 2015 European Federation for Medical Informatics (EFMI).
This article is published online with Open Access by IOS Press and distributed under the terms
of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License.
doi:10.3233/978-1-61499-512-8-892
892