Foundations of an Interoperable Framework for Serious Games and Gamified Mobile Apps in Non-communicable Disease (NCD) Prevention

Abstract

Non-communicable diseases (NCDs) are not spread through infection or other people but are caused by unhealthy behaviors and are on the rise. Most prominent examples include cardiovascular diseases, cancers, diabetes, and chronic respiratory diseases. They are responsible for an estimated 41 million deaths per year, the equivalent of 74% of all deaths globally. Many struggle to make conscious and lasting decisions about their health and physical and mental well-being, thus increasing the main risk factors for contracting one or multiple NCDs. The authors already published serious games and gamified applications for NCD prevention and have identified a need for more standardization in this domain. This paper presents the first step toward a general framework that will intensively use standards within the domain of medical informatics to assure the semantic interoperability of patient data and will support the development of games and apps to prevent NCDs. In this work's first step, the authors conducted a comparative analysis of already published serious games and gamified apps and, based on that, identified a catalog of classes of requirements.