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Children who are treated with hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT) are hospitalized for many weeks or even months. Discharge to home is important but sufficient home care is essential. Beside regular physical and laboratory checks in the outpatient clinic, information on the daily health status is mandatory for early detection of possible life threatening complication. The conventional practice is writing reports into a paper diary. This approach became unattractive for many computer-oriented children and often the compliance decreased over the long recovery time (more than 2 years). Thus we designed a game-based system to track medical data of these children. We present the results of a three-stage method where we compare the data from sick children with data from healthy children. We describe an explorative design approach and evaluate gaming preferences through a survey and an art-based drawing approach. The results show a preference of animal and fantasy characters and a majority of children illustrate a nature environment in their drawings. The most appealing game elements are “exploration”, “adventure”, “fighting” and “action”, partly with gender differences. We further reflect on the chosen array of design research methods and the use of proxies for sick children.

Maintaining and restoring health is a basic aspect of well being. On the other hand, serious games is an emerging technology growing in importance for specialized training, taking advantage of 3D games and game engines in order to improve the realistic experience of users. Thus, according to the advancement of technology and the desire to achieve good health using an interesting and enjoyable way, different serious games for health have been proposed during the last few years. In this paper, we present the core process of serious games and explain their functionalities. Then, we survey more than one hundred serious games for health and propose new classifications in four different aspects. Finally, we use fifteen relevant characteristics to classify all the surveyed games and present them with plenty of graphs and charts with corresponding discussion.

In addition to a broad range of different application areas, health games differ in the level of abstraction of the game’s message or goal and the way to achieve game benefits. Most games focus on teaching knowledge or prevention topics. Furthermore, some games focus on strengthening motivation of patients to attend a specific medication or to change their daily behavior in order to live healthier. In this paper we present the health game “Balance”, developed to optimize the self-management of teenagers with diabetes mellitus type-I. Two versions of the game were implemented: A version explicitly referring to diabetes and an implicit version of “Balance” with no diabetes content in order to reduce diabetes related reactance among juveniles. In a between-subjects experimental study with a clinical sample the two versions were compared. Results demonstrate, contrary to expectations, that the explicit game version yielded higher game enjoyment than the implicit version.