Game Clinic: Towards A Ludic Paradigm for Stress Research and Prevention

The growing ubiquity of "smart" phones, with integrated biometric tracking sensors, easy to use interfaces, and data communication capabilities have opened new possibilities for personalized medicine, preventative healthcare, as well as public health research. These new technologies have led to important developments in digital health, such as the Mobile Health Application (mHealth), which enables users to self-monitor and communicate the state of their health with practitioners or with their social network, as well as Serious Games, which aims to deliver therapeutic interventions through their interactive and ludic designs. These strategies may help address exiting shortcomings in clinical research. First, they provide a relatively cost-effective platform for monitoring patients in real-life contexts and over longer periods of time. Second, by the virtue of interactivity, they allow individuals to express their choices and preferences, and thus provide an opportunity to further personalize healthcare. Our current challenge is to design and validate these multi factor research-care strategies. This presentation will focus on a recent study, "Finding Better Games for Older Adults", which aimed to compare the objective and subjective assessment of cognitively beneficial computer games for older adults. In this mixed-method repeated-measures study, we administered three genres of computer games, and made various measurements of emotional and cognitive states using wearable biosensors, saliva samples, and psychometric instruments. Results emphasize the importance of designing stress-reducing ludic experiences in developing beneficial interventions for older adults.