Presentation

This workshop focuses on the use of pervasive healthcare, ubiquitous games and gamification to support behavior change and wellbeing. Gamification has recently become a widely applied tool for improving health behaviors such as a physically active lifestyle. The workshop aims to be the premiere venue that brings together researchers and practitioners across the disciplines of Pervasive healthcare, Systems and sensing, Ubiquitous Computing and HCI to elaborate ways in which current state of the art in gaming can be reshaped to persuade healthy behaviors and wellbeing.

Call for papers

June 3th, 2013

Games constitute a basic component of human experience in all cultures and they typically involve mental and/or physical stimulation. This motivated researchers to explore the fusion of game-based approaches and modern technologies for maintaining and regaining both physical and mental wellbeing. In particular, Gamification and Serious game-based approaches have demonstrated a great potential of promoting well-being and physical activity, and transforming the prevention, management and treatment of diseases into a fun experience. Such relatively new concepts have opened an interdisciplinary research avenue that focuses on the employment of interactive technologies for stimulating a positive change in behavior. The domain of Ubiquitous Computing plays an important role by providing effective methods for analyzing human behavior, for assessing the level of positive change in healthy behavior, for evaluating user experience, for recognizing user performance in games, for connecting activities using game elements and in general for providing the link between physical and virtual world. Putting a user in the game context (which includes goals, rules, challenges and interactions) while monitoring real environment and tracking the user behavior provide a framework that offers an immense number of opportunities for stimulating a healthy life-style as well as for the rehabilitation of motor and cognitive functions.

The goal of this workshop is to create a collaborative platform among experts from the game industry, healthcare, HCI, and UbiComp related domains to see where ubiquitous games can influence the attitudes, health and behaviors of people, and how can they be used to change human behavior to promote wellbeing. The workshop invites academic researchers and industry practitioners to submit contributions on innovative solutions, concepts, hardware/software and services for maintaining or regaining physical and mental health. The topics of special interest include (but are not limited to):

• Gamification for health related applications, to promote exercise and physical activity
• Ubiquitous games interaction experiences to promote health
• Automatic assessment of motor functions
• Evaluation of emotional response in ubiquitous designs
• Serious games for wellbeing
• Games and Virtual environments for cognitive stimulation and rehabilitation
• Supporting long-term home-based physical/cognitive rehabilitation
• Ubiquitous interactive designs that promote social inclusion of elderly and people with cognitive disabilities
• Ubiquitous games that observe and promote health
• Recognition of behaviors, gestures and playful interactions for ubiquitous games
• Technologies that promote sustainable behavior interfaces for gamification
• gamification design experiences
• case studies of use of gamification in industry and healthcare

Paper submission: Papers should be submitted through EasyChair system, and should follow the Extended Abstract formar for up to 4 pages.