Promoting Occupational Health through Gamification and E-Coaching: A 5-Month User Engagement Study

Abstract

Social gamification systems have shown potential for promoting healthy lifestyles, but applying them to occupational settings faces unique design challenges. While occupational settings offer natural communities for social interaction, fairness issues due to heterogeneous personal goals and privacy concerns increase the difficulty of designing engaging games. We explored a two-level game-design, where the first level related to achieving personal goals and the second level was a privacy-protected social competition to maximize goal compliance among colleagues. The solution was strengthened by employing occupational physicians who personalized users' goals and coached them remotely. The design was evaluated in a 5-month study with 53 employees from a Dutch university. Results suggested that the application helped half of the participants to improve their lifestyles, and most appreciated the role of the physician in goal-setting. However, long-term user engagement was undermined by the scalability-motivated design choice of one-way communication between employees and their physician. Implications for social gamification design in occupational health are discussed.

Keywords: E-coaching; behavior change; health informatics; occupational health; social gamification; user engagement; user study.

Figure 1

Overview of the design of DMCoach+. (a) System architecture; (b) Screenshots (left: goals and progress; middle: food diary input; right: leaderboard of the social gamification.

Figure 2

(a) User engagement over time as indicated by the average number of data entries per participant; (b) Histogram of points earned by participants during the summer challenge

Figure 3

Participants’ stages of change in the four behavioral domains before and after the intervention.