The Digital Catalysts: A Framework for Next-Generation Health Games

Noncommunicable diseases (NCDs), such as diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, and various cancers, are responsible for a staggering 74% of all global deaths annually. Modifiable behavioral risk factors – like poor diet, physical inactivity, and smoking – contribute to many of these diseases. Serious games and gamified applications hold immense potential to help users change their behavior and reduce their risk, but the impact of most existing solutions is limited by interoperability issues. That is, many gamified solutions operate in isolation—they cannot talk to each other or be easily integrated with other patient data in the broader healthcare system.

Christoph Aigner, a PhD student working with Research Group for Industrial Software, INSO, and his team tackled this issue in their study, "Digital Catalysts for Noncommunicable Disease Prevention Serious Games and Gamified Applications: Framework Design Study," published in JMIR Serious Games. The authors developed and presented a framework with foundational guidelines for creating novel applications that are not just engaging but also fully integrated and interoperable.

Building a Common Language for Digital Health

The team built upon their own experience developing serious games for NCD prevention to create a novel, interoperable framework to facilitate the meaningful exchange of data.

The framework is the result of a comprehensive analysis and is defined by six key areas that cover the major design and implementation aspects of NCD prevention applications. These areas emphasize semantic interoperability, which is the ability to automatically interpret information accurately across different systems. The goal is to ensure that data—whether it's a patient's mood score, calorie intake from a game, or blood glucose level—can be used by clinicians and researchers alike.

Six Pillars of Interoperable Design

The framework provides guidance for developers and researchers, covering areas from organizational strategy to technical details. Key components include:

• Organizational Interoperability: Integrating games into the actual care process so therapists and clinicians can effectively "prescribe" them. It also covers government platforms and integration into national and multinational health data spaces (like the European Health Data Space).
• Design and Development Best Practices: Defining essential requirements, recommending effective Behavior Change Techniques (BCTs) like self-monitoring and feedback, and suggesting game mechanics that are intuitive and accessible on mobile devices.
• Semantic Interoperability: This is the core technical element, providing an Implementation Guide (IG) that uses the widely adopted HL7 FHIR standard for interoperability. This ensures data is structured correctly for exchange with public Electronic Health Records (EHRs).

These guidelines help address the current fragmentation in the field. The adoption of this kind of framework has the potential to boost the effectiveness and impact of NCD prevention interventions. By promoting the exchange of meaningful data, the guidelines may help to address fragmentation in the field,  improve patient care, and enable research via anonymized data.

The research team chose to submit their research to JMIR Serious Games due to the high ranking and strong reputation of the journal. They recognized that the journal’s focus on digital health innovation and implementation was the ideal fit for disseminating their work to a wide audience of specialized researchers and implementers.

To learn more about the technical specifications and design considerations required to maximize the impact of serious games in NCD prevention, watch the video with Christoph Aigner and read the full research article to explore the detailed framework design study.

Subscribe Now