Students’ Role in Gamified Solutions in Healthcare RDI Project

Turku University of Applied Sciences has focused on game development education since 2009. In Turku Game Lab facilities, students and engineers have worked in a close cooperation in Gamified Solutions in Healthcare RDI project (briefly GSH) funded by the Finnish Funding Agency for Innovation (Tekes). In this paper, we will report how our students have worked in various roles in this project. The main focus in the GSH project has been on new services and effective activity solutions to elderly people through gamification. That is to say our objective is to offer more options for the elderly’s self care and eases the healthcare professional’s work load.

Our students studying health informatics have participated in planning and idea generation phase. The first results have been published in [1,2]. In the GSH project, we have tested rehabilitation in various field experiments [3,4]. Students have participated in preliminary tests and events in which elderly people have played motion detection games such as SportWall and SkiingGame. Students have also been in essential role in the game development itself. Not only our students but also students from our international cooperation universities (Japan and Singapore) have been involved in the development activities. For example Old Photos on Map application has been reported in [5].

Keywords: CDIO, Rehabilitation games, Health informatics, gamification

[1] Raitoharju, R, Luimula, M., Pyae, A., Pitkäkangas, P., and Smed, J. (2014) Serious Games and Active Healthy Ageing: A Pre-study, In: Proceedings of the 5th International Conference Well-being in the Information Society, (WIS 2014), August 18-20, Turku, Finland, 7p. [2] Pyae, A., Raitoharju, R., Luimula, M., Pitkäkangas, P., and Smed, J. Serious Games and Active Healthy Ageing: A Pilot Usability Testing of Existing Games, An International Journal of Networking and Virtual Organisations, (accepted) [3] Pyae, A., Luimula, M., and Smed, J. Investigating the Usability of Interactive Physical Activity Games for Elderly: A Pilot Study, In: Proceedings of the 5th IEEE Conference on Cognitive Infocommunications, (accepted) [4] Pyae, A., Luimula, M., Saarenpää, T., and Smed, J. When Japanese Elderly Play Finnish Exergames: A Cross-Cultural Study, An International Journal of Usability Studies, (submitted) [5] Yoshii, A., Malmivirta, H., Luimula, M., Pitkäkangas, P., and Nakajima, T. Designing a Map-Based Application and a Conversational Agent for Addressing Memory Problems. In: Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, August 2-7, 2015, 6p. (accepted)

Proceedings of the 12th International CDIO Conference, Turku, Finland, June 12-16 2016