Jolie N. Haun*, Department of Veterans Affairs, HSR&D/RR&D Center of Innovation on Disability and Rehabilitation Research, James A Haley VA Medical Center, Tampa, United States Track: Practice Presentation Topic: Digital Learning Presentation Type: Poster presentation Submission Type: Single Presentation Last modified: 2014-05-28

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Background: Game-motivated applications are gaining popularity for supporting behavior adoption in health-related interventions, in part because of the potential for reaching diverse audiences that might not otherwise be motivated to engage in interventions designed to promote behavior change. Game-motivated interventions require integration of multiple design and gaming elements to create a sense of community, progression, competition, and accomplishment. Literature indicates these applications are effective in helping users adopt behaviors, and achieve and maintain goals. The Department of Veterans Affairs, Veterans Health Administration has invested in the development of a multi-module game-motivated web-based instructional application to promote awareness, knowledge, and skilled adoption of electronic health resources (e.g. electronic health portal, kiosks, telehealth services, mobile apps). This project leverages gaming elements such as avatars, a social learning environment, interactive learning games, point acquisition and a rewards system with scoreboards that track individual and team performance.

Objective: This presentation will review the design and gamification concepts considered and integrated when creating a game-motivated intervention for diverse patient audiences and provide an overview and demonstration of a web-based game-motivated instructional program designed to support patient awareness, adoption, and skilled use of electronic health resources. A live demonstration of the product will be presented.

Conclusion: When designing and developing game-based interventions, it is important to consider a variety of gamification concepts and integrate them into the user experience to motivate engagement and promote knowledge and skill acquisition, and adoption of the desired behavior. This project provides a rare example of a comprehensive approach to using gamification within the Department of Veterans Affairs, Veterans Health Administration to create an engaging experience, while providing education and skill building about eHealth tools available to help the diverse veteran population manage their health care.