On Gamifying an Existing Healthcare System: Method, Conceptual Model and Evaluation

Software gamification aims at engaging users with software system features. User engagement is promoted via a gamification model that associates game elements (e.g., points) and rules (e.g., ranking policy) with each feature. Gamification has been increasingly explored in certain healthcare domains, such as chronic disease management and physical activity. However, there are currently two important literature gaps. First, certain healthcare domains in which user engagement is even more critical, such as the prevention of mosquito-transmitted diseases, have not systematically explored gamification yet. Healthcare systems of this domain largely depend on the wide engagement of the population, health professionals and authorities. Second, gamification is often introduced in existing systems developed without gamification in mind. Current methods are quite limited to support this task. In this paper, we report our experience while defining, incorporating, and evaluating a gamification model of an existing healthcare system called VazaZika. VazaZika is intended to assist the prevention of mosquito-transmitted diseases in economically emerging countries. We present and discuss the application of a method, adapted from a previous study, to support the design and incorporation of a gamification model in existing systems (VazaZika, in our case). We also present the resulting conceptual model based on 12 game elements and 16 rules. We evaluate this model with 20 users in terms of ease of use and potential for user engagement. Our results suggest that our conceptual model has resulted in an easy-to-use system with the potential of truly engaging users with critical healthcare-related features. We expect the method and its resulting model can be further reused and adapted to similar healthcare systems.