1UP Workshop: Games for
Health and Wellbeing

About

Games have traditionally been used as a medium to assess, maintain, or even improve human’s health and living standards. This concerns various aspects of health and wellbeing, such as physical health, mental health, cognitive capacity, and accessibility. The rapid improvement of (mostly video) game technology, alongside advances in Artificial Intelligence and sensor technology, has created a fertile field for research and development of human-centered games within these domains. From the gamification of routine medical tests, to the real-time personalization of at-home gamified therapy sessions, both game and health studies have benefitted from each other’s progress. Ultimately, games can be employed as a medium for both measuring and monitoring human behavior, as well as a means towards human improvement and facilitation of overall wellbeing. This workshop addresses various questions around games and immersive environments focused on health and wellbeing, including the following: 

● To what extent can games supplement, or even replace, traditional therapeutic sessions?
● How can we design games that adapt to match the capabilities of each individual player?
● Are there new methods emerging from health sciences that are especially suited for a game application?
● Are there new game technologies that can be purposefully applied to solve health challenges?

This half-day workshop will take place at the 2025 COG conference in Lisbon, Portugal. 

For information regarding the conference, please visit https://cog2025.inesc-id.pt/.

Topics

Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

● Games for physical health and motor learning
● Games for mental health
● Games for people with disabilities
● Games for human improvement
● Games for health education and training
● Alternative game controllers based on players’ capabilities

Accepted Papers

Marlene Cristina Neves Rosa, Susana Lopes and Alexandre Cavaleiro - A playful panacea – exploring the role of board games to assess behaviour in people with dementia.

Morgan C. Evans, Geoff Kaufman and Jessica Hammer - Designing Self-Efficacy Games for Informal Health Knowledge

Caspar Krijgsman, Jackie Poos and Rafael Bidarra - A VR and AI-powered game-based approach to minimally-invasive social cognitive assessment

Lorenzo James, Parvaneh Parvin, Laura Genga, Barbara Montagne and Pieter Van Gorp - Interleaving Health and Entertainment: Toward an Architecture for Ethically Enabled Dark Patterns in Digital Interventions

Organizing Committee

Important Dates

Paper submission deadline (technical papers): March 15, 2025

Paper submission deadline (short/demo papers): May 30, 2025

Acceptance notification: June 27, 2025

Workshop Time and Date: 11:00 - 12:30. August 29, 2025

Conference Dates: August 26-29, 2025

Program

Workshop Time and Date: 11:00 - 12:30. August 29, 2025

Venue: TBA

11:00 - 11:40 Invited speaker - Paula Magalhães

11:40 - 12:00 Marlene Cristina Neves Rosa, Susana Lopes and Alexandre Cavaleiro - A playful panacea – exploring the role of board games to assess behaviour in people with dementia

12:00 - 12:15 Caspar Krijgsman, Jackie Poos and Rafael Bidarra - A VR and AI-powered game-based approach to minimally-invasive social cognitive assessment

12:15 - 12:30 Lorenzo James, Parvaneh Parvin, Laura Genga, Barbara Montagne and Pieter Van Gorp - Interleaving Health and Entertainment: Toward an Architecture for Ethically Enabled Dark Patterns in Digital Interventions