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Background: The use of health apps to support the treatment of chronic pain is gaining importance. Most available pain management apps are still lacking in content quality and quantity as their developers neither involve health experts to ensure target group suitability nor use gamification to engage and motivate the user. To close this gap, we aimed to develop a gamified pain management app, Pain-Mentor.
Objective: To determine whether medical professionals would approve of Pain-Mentor’s concept and content, this study aimed to evaluate the quality of the app’s first prototype with experts from the field of chronic pain management and to discover necessary improvements.
Methods: A total of 11 health professionals with a background in chronic pain treatment and 2 mobile health experts participated in this study. Each expert first received a detailed presentation of the app. Afterward, they tested Pain-Mentor and then rated its quality using the mobile application rating scale (MARS) in a semistructured interview.
Results: The experts found the app to be of excellent general (mean 4.54, SD 0.55) and subjective quality (mean 4.57, SD 0.43). The app-specific section was rated as good (mean 4.38, SD 0.75). Overall, the experts approved of the app’s content, namely, pain and stress management techniques, behavior change techniques, and gamification. They believed that the use of gamification in Pain-Mentor positively influences the patients’ motivation and engagement and thus has the potential to promote the learning of pain management techniques. Moreover, applying the MARS in a semistructured interview provided in-depth insight into the ratings and concrete suggestions for improvement.
Conclusions: The experts rated Pain-Mentor to be of excellent quality. It can be concluded that experts perceived the use of gamification in this pain management app in a positive manner. This showed that combining pain management with gamification did not negatively affect the app’s integrity. This study was therefore a promising first step in the development of Pain-Mentor.
The iterative development and evaluation of the gamified stress management app “Stress-Mentor”
(2020)
The gamification of mHealth applications is a critically discussed topic. On one hand, studies show that gamification can have positive impact on an app’s usability and user experience. Furthermore, evidence grows that gamification can positively influence the regular usage of health apps. On the other hand it is questioned whether gamification is useful for health apps in all contexts, especially regarding stress management. However, to this point few studies investigated the gamification of stress management apps.
This thesis describes the iterative development of the gamified stress management app “Stress-Mentor” and examines whether the implemented gamification concept results in changes in the app’s usage behavior, as well as in usability and user experience ratings.
The results outline how the users’ involvement in “Stress-Mentor’s” development through different studies influenced the app’s design and helped to identify necessary improvements. The thesis also shows that users who received a gamified app version used the app more frequently than users of a non-gamified control group.
While gamification of stress management is critically discussed, it was positively received by the users of “Stress-Mentor” throughout the app’s development. The results also showed that gamification can have positive effects on the usage behavior of a stress management app and therefore, results in an increased exposure to the app’s content. Moreover, an expert study outlined the applicability of “Stress-Mentor’s” concept for other health contexts.