A look back at the Gamification in eHealth event

What a wealth of ideas and inspiration we gained during our Gamification in eHealth event! It was a great event, in which various experts from the healthcare world talked about the importance of gamification in eHealth. We are facing enormous challenges in healthcare, including an ageing population, staff shortages and rising healthcare costs. It’s time for some new solutions.

“If there is anything the Covid-19 pandemic has taught us, it is that we are very vulnerable as humans and that we must therefore be able to provide care in a much more remote way,” explained Douwe E. Atsma , Professor of Cardiology at Leiden University Medical Center. One of the ways in which the LUMC offers remote care is with The Box. Douwe explained that “The Box is a package containing various devices for taking medical readings at home. With The Box and the accompanying LUMC Care app, people can, for example, measure their blood pressure at home, take a recording of their heartbeat, and speak to their treating doctor or nurse specialist via a digital consultation hour. During the coronavirus pandemic, more than 400 COVID boxes were distributed to patients, reducing the number of COVID patients who were ultimately admitted to hospital by 66%. Remote care allows us to work much more preventatively and to actively put the patient to work. All data is collected in a secure manner and there are more direct lines between the various parties.” Valentijn Visch, Associate Professor of Design for Health Motivation at TU Delft, said: “With eHealth and gamified eHealth you can reach a much larger audience than is currently the case. You can also make it much easier for people to seek medical help. You can reduce the stigma associated with some healthcare issues with eHealth. However, a lot of research and development is still needed to realise this potential. One of the ways to do this is to personalise gamified eHealth to the specific wishes, needs and context of the user. To design personalised eHealth like this, we first need to know a) what these needs are, b) whether and how they differ, and c) whether it is possible to connect eHealth to these needs. A second challenge is to make the use of gamified eHealth long-term, preferably over many years. One of the ways to do this is to let the eHealth application change along with the user.” Pauline Jansen (Child & Adolescent Psychiatry/Psychology at Erasmus MC) built on what Douwe and Valentijn told us, and told us about the Generation R app. “With this app, we ask young people five short questions every day for a week, such as who the person is hanging out with, and how he/she is feeling at that moment. By asking these questions about emotions a few times a day, we as researchers get a good picture of the emotions of young people over the course of the day. The challenge in this is, of course, to continue to motivate young people to answer the questions consistently every day. This is the same for an app we use as part of the treatment of clients with binge eating. We wanted to find out if the Binge Eating app can help clients gain a better understanding of which emotions trigger binge eating and whether emotions trigger them at all. For some clients this method seems to help, but others had difficulty completing the short questionnaire often enough. Gamification can probably help with that, making it easier to keep using an app consistently.” In short, the Gamification event gave us a lot of valuable information and new insights: a successful event, if you ask us! We ended the afternoon with - what else - delicious Italian snacks and freshly made pizzas by our own colleague Rob. Here’s to the next edition!