Engaging children in diabetes education through mobile games

Abstract

Traditional methods for diabetic education rely heavily on written materials and there is only a limited amount of resources targeted at educating diabetic children. Mobile games can be effective, evidence-based, and motivating tools for the promotion of children's health. In our earlier work, we proposed a novel approach for designing computer games aimed for educating children with diabetes and applied our design strategy to a mobile Android game (Mario Brothers).

In this paper, we report the findings of a preliminary evaluation study (n = 12) conducted over 1 week. The initial results showed that the children found the game engaging and improved their knowledge of healthy diet and lifestyle.