Effects of a Gamified Agent-Based System for Personalized Elderly Care: Pilot Usability Study

Diogo Martinho; Vítor Crista; João Carneiro; Kenji Matsui; Juan Manuel Corchado; Goreti Marreiros

doi:10.2196/48063

Effects of a Gamified Agent-Based System for Personalized Elderly Care: Pilot Usability Study

JMIR Serious Games. 2023 Nov 23:11:e48063. doi: 10.2196/48063.

Authors

Diogo Martinho¹, Vítor Crista¹, João Carneiro¹, Kenji Matsui², Juan Manuel Corchado³, Goreti Marreiros¹

Affiliations

¹ Research Group on Intelligent Engineering and Computing for Advanced Innovation and Development, Polytechnic of Porto - School of Engineering (ISEP), Porto, Portugal.
² Osaka Institute of Technology, Osaka, Japan.
³ Grupo de investigación en Bioinformática, Sistemas Informáticos Inteligentes y Tecnología Educativa, Salamanca, Spain.

PMID: 37995116
PMCID: PMC10704320
DOI: 10.2196/48063

Abstract

Background: The global percentage of older people has increased significantly over the last decades. Information and communication technologies have become essential to develop and motivate them to pursue healthier ways of living. This paper examines a personalized coaching health care service designed to maintain living conditions and active aging among older people. Among the technologies the service includes, we highlight the use of both gamification and cognitive assistant technologies designed to support older people and an application combining a cognitive virtual assistant to directly interact with the older person and provide feedback on their current health condition and several gamification techniques to motivate the older person to stay engaged with the application and pursuit of healthier daily habits.

Objective: This pilot study aimed to investigate the feasibility and usability of a gamified agent-based system for older people and obtain preliminary results on the effectiveness of the intervention regarding physical activity health outcomes.

Methods: The study was designed as an intervention study comparing pre- and posttest results. The proposed gamified agent-based system was used by 12 participants over 7 days (1 week), and step count data were collected with access to the Google Fit application programming interface. Step count data after the intervention were compared with average step count data before the intervention (average daily values over a period of 4 weeks before the intervention). A 1-tailed Student t test was used to determine the relationship between the dependent and independent variables. Usability was measured using the System Usability Scale questionnaire, which was answered by 8 of the 12 participants in the study.

Results: The posttest results showed significant pre- to posttest changes (P=.30; 1-tailed Student t test) with a moderate effect size (Cohen d=0.65). The application obtained an average usability score of 78.

Conclusions: The presented pilot was validated, showing the positive health effects of using gamification techniques and a virtual cognitive assistant. Additionally, usability metrics considered for this study confirmed high adherence and interest from most participants in the pilot.

Keywords: agent-based system; coaching system; cognitive; cognitive assistants; elderly care; gamification; intervention; older people; physical activity; technology; usability; virtual assistant.

©Diogo Martinho, Vítor Crista, João Carneiro, Kenji Matsui, Juan Manuel Corchado, Goreti Marreiros. Originally published in JMIR Serious Games (https://games.jmir.org), 23.11.2023.