These days, along with the fast modern living pace, people are getting busier than ever. As a consequence, both potential physical and mental health risks are becoming concerning issues. Therefore, a solution can support controlling health problems while still allow users to keep up with the living pace is a need. The appearance of mobile apps that using gamification can be seen as salvage at the moment.
Although people know that they need to do something to improve their health, going to the gym, yoga class or joining meditation sessions seem to be too hard since they are packed with their work and daily basis. Understanding the needs of the users, there are many health apps are published to meet the demand of the users which is creating as many opportunities as possible to taking care of health problems in a strict time condition.
According to King, Greaves, Exeter & Darzi (2013), mobile apps are effective platforms for delivering health interventions. Gamification on apps has contributes to smoking cessation and encouraging medication adherence, which can hardly be done without repeating reminders. It can be seen that gamification is changing their users’ behaviour.
The repeating reminders and short workout exercises lead to a good habit of doing exercise when they have time. Moreover, gamification elements on health apps are also focusing on creating encouragement and motivation for users so that they can be more health aware.
The podcast below are some of my sharing about “Gamification” as well as an app healing app called “Headspace”.
Reference
King, D, Greaves, F, Exeter, C & Darzi, A 2013, “Gamification’: Influencing health
behaviours with games”, Institute of Global Health Innovation, p. 76, retrieved from 25 April 2021, <https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0141076813480996>.
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