GamifyHealth: A Generic Software Framework for Health Behavioral Change

Many serious games integrate sensed health data to drive behavior change. However, game developers create each game individually, leading to fragmentation, where a new game is created for each new combination of health data and game story. We present GamifyHealth, a generic software framework that integrates sensors for measuring health data with games that encourage health behavior change. We start by identifying elements common to apps that gamify health across three categories: (1) the sensors that provide data; (2) gamification elements; and (3) the mapping of health data to gameplay. Based on a characterization of existing games, we create the GamifyHealth framework that supports generic and flexible development of games for health behavior change. A game can access available health data through a series of observer interfaces provided by the framework. This allows separation of code that interacts with specific sensors and code that presents the game story so that sensor developers and game developers can work independently. Because GamifyHealth provides a clear abstraction of connections from health data to gameplay, a health domain expert can focus attention on connections between sensor data and the game elements that effect behavior change. We have implemented the framework as an Android library and demonstrate its usefulness by re-implementing two existing sensor controlled digital games using GamifyHealth. GamifyHealth simplifies the code of these games and separates the logic for the game developer, the health domain expert, and the sensing integrator, making the resulting implementations more flexible and maintainable.