Abstract

The prevalence of obesity in modern society is constantly growing. A promising approach to counteract this alarming development is the use of gamification in mobile health applications. Gamification focuses on applying game mechanics to non-game contexts in order to increase user motivation. Within the mobile health industry, there is a vast quantity of calorie and water tracking applications but with very little to no gamification elements. Besides, there is a lack of adherence to professional guidelines in the field of gamified mobile health applications. In this thesis, the implementation of a research based gamified smartphone application named Avatrack will be presented. The general idea behind the application is that by tracking the daily food and water consumption, the user takes care of an avatar which immediately shows if the consumption is fitting the personal requirements. Research and professional guidelines in the field of nutrition, hydration and gamification will be analysed and incorporated in the application. Finally, an evaluation will be conducted to measure the perceived gamefulness of the application using the Gameful Experience Questionnaire. The results show that various dimensions of gamefulness are present and that dimensions like immersion and social experience fall short. Due to the limited number of participants (six in total), a second evaluation is strongly required to increase the significance of the results and to compare Avatrack to conventional tracking applications that do not include gamification.

Results/Implementation/Project Description

Conclusion

[ PDF (optional) ] 

[ Slides Kickoff/Final (optional)]