Pervasive Game Design to Promote an Active Lifestyle among OlderAdults Using Social Interaction

摘要

Pervasive electronic games use innovative mechanics to create immersion and promote user engagement, thus figuring as a powerful, yet still unexplored tool that can help elderly people lead more active lifestyles. In this paper, we describe the design of a pervasive game and an experimental setting that allows to test how pervasive game design elements can affect older adults’ motivation to increase their levels of physical activity, using social interaction as study case. Two variations of the game were developed, one that includes social interaction and one without it. A randomized controlled trial is proposed to investigate if that difference affects the average level of physical activity of players in two groups, control and test, measured by the total number of steps and total walked distance pre and post intervention.