Designing Personalised Gamification of mHealth Survey Applications

Abstract

: To monitor patients’ well-being and evaluate the efficacy of digital health intervention, patients are required to regularly respond to standardised surveys. Responding to a large number of questionnaires is effortful and may discourage mHealth app users from engaging with the intervention. Gamification might reduce the burden of self-reporting. However, researchers have adopted various approaches to the personalisation of gamification design: ranking of game elements by the user, Hexad Gamification User Types classification (G) and selection of preferred design mockups (MU) . In this paper we report on a small population study involving 54 healthy participants aged 17 to 60, and investigate if these alternative approaches lead to the same design choices. We find that different evaluation approaches lead to different choices of gamification elements. We suggest to use game element ranking in combination with mockup selection. Hexad player classification might be less useful in the context of mHealth applications design.