Description
Games have traditionally been used as a medium to assess, maintain, or even improve human’s health and living standards. This concerns various aspects of health and wellbeing, such as physical health, mental health, cognitive capacity, and accessibility. The rapid improvement of (mostly video) game technology, alongside advances in Artificial Intelligence and sensor technology, has created a fertile field for research and development of human-centred games within these domains. From the gamification of routine medical tests, to the real-time personalization of at-home gamified therapy sessions, both game and health studies have benefitted from each other’s progress. Ultimately, games can be employed as a medium for both measuring and monitoring human behaviour, as well as a means towards human improvement and facilitation of overall wellbeing.
This workshop addresses various questions around games and immersive environments focused on health and wellbeing, including the following:
- To what extent can games supplement, or even replace, traditional therapeutic sessions?
- How can we design games that adapt to match the capabilities of each individual player?
- Are there new methods emerging from health sciences that are especially suited for a game application?
- Are there new game technologies that can be purposefully applied to solve health challenges?
Tentative Program
The workshop is planned to be a half-day workshop, with emphasis on interdisciplinary collaboration projects. There will be oral presentations and demos, followed by the formation of discussion groups based on expertise and research interests. At the end of the workshop, each group will summarize and present their discussions and potential future directions.
Call for papers
We invite paper contributions in related areas in one of the following forms:
- Full papers
- Short papers/work in progress
- Demo papers
Potential topics include, but are not limited to:
- Games for physical health and motor learning
- Games for mental health
- Games for people with disabilities
- Games for human improvement
- Games for health education and training
- Alternative game controllers based on players’ capabilities
All paper submissions must follow the COG submission requirements. Please select the workshops name as a track during submission once the auxiliary paper submission opens. Accepted papers or outputs will be published in the CoG 2025 proceedings.
Organizers
- Paris Mavromoustakos-Blom, Tilburg University
- Pieter Spronck, Tilburg University
- Rafael Bidarra, TU Delft
- Gloria Mittmann, Karl Landsteiner University of Health Sciences
- Nikolaos Stergiou, University of Nebraska