Therapy gamification to improve children compliance. A systematic literature review

In the healthcare domain there is a growing body of literature addressing the use of games and gamification strategies which go beyond entertainment to positively affect the therapy outcomes and the health status of the patients. This represents an emerging field of experimentation that requires a holistic perspective to consider both the medical requirements and the patients’ characteristics and needs. When approaching this topic, a common framework to guide the game design process is missing. To fill this gap, this paper reports a systematic literature review about the use of games and gamification strategies to stimulate children’s compliance in different therapeutic contexts. The objective is to analyse the state of the art by identifying both opportunities and constraints, and derive a common framework to guide the future design of games. The results show that games and gamification strategies are used in both pharmacological therapy and non-pharmacological therapy, to directly increase the compliance (for practising rehabilitation exercises, for adopting healthy behaviours) or to indirectly affect the compliance for example by making the therapy enjoyable. By categorising the existing literature, it emerged a main conceptual distinction between “therapeutic games” and “games for therapy”, which have peculiar characteristics and implications for their design and evaluation.