Digital Entertaining Health Applications: Researching the Fundamentals of a Cause-Effect Relationship

There are many different approaches on how digital entertaining health applications and particularly health games can be adopted to improve a person's health. In general, they can be effective on a cognitive, behavioral or emotional level, e.g. by providing knowledge, teaching skills, evoking behavioral changes or supporting psychological aspects such as self-efficacy. We illustrate the developmental process of health games and highlight the importance of methodically sound evaluations: The effectiveness of health games is hardly predictable mainly due to largely unknown cause-and-effect relationships between game elements and their impact on the player. Fundamental research in this area could contribute to the effectiveness of entertainment health applications. Furthermore, specific evaluation challenges regarding target group and sample size, evaluation methods and study setting are discussed.