Speaker
Speaker Info
- Name
- Stéphanie Carlier
- Organization
- IDLab, UGent - imec
- Country
- Belgium
- Biography
- I am a postdoctoral researcher at IDLab, Faculty of Engineering and Architecture at Ghent University and imec. My work is focused on leveraging serious games and gamification to enhance healthcare, with an emphasis on personalized interventions and stakeholder empowerment. I aim to streamline the design process of personalized serious games, fostering collaboration among stakeholders by promoting knowledge reuse across disciplines. My work spans the broad field of digital health, addressing diverse use cases such as anxiety reduction in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder, physical activity promotion, behavioral change and physical rehabilitation. To do so, I have designed and developed serious games, VR therapy systems, gamified interventions and an ontology for behavior change, working closely with domain experts and end users to ensure impactful and user-centered solutions.
- Photo
Presentation Info
- Title
- Empowering Health : Personalised Serious Games and Gamification
- Summary
- This talk explores the integration of digital health solutions, particularly serious games and gamification, highlighting their potential in enhancing engagement and empowerment in healthcare. Despite the benefits, many tools face high abandonment rates and require personalization for long-term effectiveness. My research during my PhD focused on creating personalized serious games and gamification strategies across three health domains: mental health, rehabilitation, and behaviour change. Several interventions were developed, including a game for children with Autism Spectrum Disorder to reduce stress and anxiety, a Virtual Reality tool for the physical rehabilitation of patients with Unilateral Spatial Neglect, and an ontology-driven decision support system to increase physical activity among adults. These tools were co-designed with healthcare professionals to ensure they addressed real-world needs and maximized user engagement. Our research underscored the necessity for a knowledge-driven, multidisciplinary approach to game design, incorporating input from various stakeholders such as healthcare professionals, researchers and engineers. While this approach ensures engaging and personalized experiences, it is resource-intensive and often starts from scratch for each new serious game. To address scalability and sustainability, we proposed a software engineering framework focusing on reusability of stakeholder knowledge and intelligent algorithms. This framework aims to streamline the development of personalized serious games, enabling faster prototyping, validation, and evaluation of engagement mechanisms and health outcomes. This foundation can pave the way for future research on standardizing these tools, ultimately improving the long-term effectiveness of serious games for health.
- Keynote