Gamification of Overweight prevention and Active Lifestyle (GOAL)

GOAL aims to develop a multi-dimensional theoretical framework that supports evidence-based overweight prevention via gamified health technologies. The framework targets eHealth service providers and urban infrastructure designers. The project addresses a theoretical gap between the disciplines of health behavior change, smart healthy living environments and health game design. A socio-ecological approach will be combined with design science methods to develop an integrated and validated framework. The work plan consists of two phases: in the first phase, a literature review will be conducted to combine theoretical insights from the three domains. In parallel, focus groups will be organized to elicit input from the target group, deliberately including participants with a varying socio-economic status. In the second phase, the preliminary outcome of the first phase will be evaluated in various experiments which incrementally refine the theory via different configurations of health games. In phase one, we will compute conceptual maps from the knowledge embedded in research papers. In phase two, we will perform analyses not only on data from theory-based survey but also on primitive data from the eHealth tools. Besides statistical tests based on hypotheses we will also use association rule mining and other computational intelligence techniques.