An opinion mining methodology to analyse games for health

Paula Alexandra Silva; Renato Santos

doi:10.1007/s11042-022-14070-w

An opinion mining methodology to analyse games for health

Multimed Tools Appl. 2023;82(9):12957-12976. doi: 10.1007/s11042-022-14070-w. Epub 2022 Nov 5.

Authors

Paula Alexandra Silva¹, Renato Santos¹

Affiliation

¹ Department of Informatics Engineering, University of Coimbra, Centre for Informatics and Systems of the University of Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal.

Abstract

Despite the positive impact of games for health on players' health, users tend to stop playing them after a short period of time, leading benefits to fade. It is therefore important to understand how to sustain interest and, in this way, preserve the health benefits of games for health. This could be achieved by continuously reviewing user feedback after product launch and using this information to inform (re)design and better address user needs. With the growth of social media, user opinions became widely available in public forums. This abundance of information affords us the possibility of, through the application of natural language processing and sentiment analysis techniques, tapping into user opinions and automatically analysing and extracting knowledge from them. This paper introduces a methodology that analyses user comments posted on YouTube about the Just Dance game, to automatically extract information about Usability, User Experience (UX), and Perceived Health Impacts related to Quality of Life (H-QoL). In doing so, the methodology uses a pre-established vocabulary, based on the English lexicon and its semantic relations, to annotate the presence of 38 concepts (five of Usability, 18 of UX, and 15 of H-QoL) and to analyse sentiment. The results of the information extraction and processing are displayed on a dashboard that allows for the exploration and browsing of the results, which can be useful to better understand the opinions and impacts perceived by users and to inform the (re)design of games for health. The methodology proposed builds upon over 500,000 user comments collected from over 32,000 videos.

Keywords: Health; Natural language processing; Opinion mining; Quality of life; Usability; User experience.

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2022, Springer Nature or its licensor holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.