Gamified Surveys and Cognitive Load Detection in mHealth: Abstract and Introduction

Table of Links

Abstract and Introduction

Related Work

Methods

Results and Discussion

Limitations

Conclusion, Acknowledgment, and References

Abstract

The effectiveness of digital treatments can be measured by requiring patients to self-report their state through applications, however, it can be overwhelming and causes disengagement. We conduct a study to explore the impact of gamification on self-reporting. Our approach involves the creation of a system to assess cognitive load (CL) through the analysis of photoplethysmography (PPG) signals. The data from 11 participants is utilized to train a machine learning model to detect CL. Subsequently, we create two versions of surveys: a gamified and a traditional one. We estimate the CL experienced by other participants (13) while completing surveys. We find that CL detector performance can be enhanced via pre-training on stress detection tasks. For 10 out of 13 participants, a personalized CL detector can achieve an F1 score above 0.7. We find no difference between the gamified and non-gamified surveys in terms of CL but participants prefer the gamified version.

Introduction

Digital health interventions (DHI) support patient health monitoring and treatment provision outside of the traditional clinical setting. To assess patient health status and track the effectiveness of remote treatments patients are requested to regularly fill surveys which consist of numerous questions relating to their physical and mental health. However, responding to questionnaires is laborious and might discourage the consistent use of mobile health (mHealth) applications. Recently Oakley-Girvan et al.[13] performed scoping review of mobile interventions and identified application features that impact patient engagement. A high number of surveys were among the features decreasing engagement with the mHealth apps. This is a problem when health intervention outcome is associated with effective engagement with the application[4].

To encourage long-term engagement app developers use gamification[9]. The use of game elements such as progress tracking and rewards has shown to motivate users to be physically active[19] or maintain a healthy diet[3]. However, the introduction of game elements in mHealth surveys context has been less commonly studied. In this work, we investigate the impact of the inclusion of simple game elements in mobile surveys on completion time and the cognitive burden of self-reporting. We hypothesize that gamification can ease the process of survey completion and ultimately facilitate long-term well-being tracking. To test this hypothesis we train a machine learning tool for cognitive load detection. Then, we develop gamified and not-gamified versions of a mobile survey application and conduct a study with human subjects to assess the effort required to complete these surveys using the developed tool.