Abstract
The number of children aged 5–19 categorized as obese or overweight exceeds 340 million worldwide, but existing programs have only limited effectiveness because more than 50% of the times the weight is regained after treatment ends and often requires an expensive and laborious multi-professional therapy. The aim of this study was to examine which guidelines for gamified wearables can be developed into an effective tool for weight loss and trigger long-term behavior change within children.
The thesis comprises a literature analysis and a qualitative research design. Open-ended questionnaires were distributed to 3 clinicians and 18 children and analyzed using MaxQDA. Three independent variables (age, gender, and BMI) were considered.
The results of this study identified four guidelines for developing a prototype. These guidelines are obesity management tool, game approach, rewards, and education. Emotional support was theoretically a fifth guideline but not empirically supported. Results could not reliably answer whether long-term behavior change can be triggered through gamified wearables, but the potential of gamified wearables is high. Based on the identified fundamental guidelines, a prototype, i.e., “Body Balance,” was developed composed of (1) game approach, (2) rewards, (3) obesity management tools, and (4) education.
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Notes
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http://www.who.int/dietphysicalactivity/media/en/gsfs_obesity.pdf & American Medical Association, “Obesity as a disease,” Policy Statement, vol. 420, no. 13, pp. 6–18, 2013, http://www.amaassn.org/assets/meeting/2013a/a13-addendum-refcomm-d.pdf
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Yulia Byron-Moiseenko for her drawings in the prototype.
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Schulz, L., Spil, A.A.M.T., de Vries, S.A.S. (2020). Changing Behavior of Kids with Obesity with Gamified Wearables. In: Wickramasinghe, N., Bodendorf, F. (eds) Delivering Superior Health and Wellness Management with IoT and Analytics. Healthcare Delivery in the Information Age. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17347-0_7
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