Serious Game for Person-Centered Care

As part of my master’s degree, I had the opportunity to work in a project to design a serious game to foster better practices in geriatric centres.

Matia Fundazioa is a foundation committed to the search, development and permanent application of knowledge and innovation at different levels of care. They provide it as a service in the fields of health, social services and disability. During the course of my master’s degree, we had the opportunity to take the challenge to design a serious game that educated caregivers about the person-centred model.

Introduction

Person-centred care model has been from a while gradually being integrated among geriatric centres all around the world. This model has the purpose of improving seniors experience in their daily lives. It involves a user-centred way of attending, identifying and meeting seniors needs to improve their quality of life.

To achieve this is, some organisations require the creation of new dynamics that positively impact the user experience.

Countless geriatric centres still have a model of attention focused on the service, that can impact negatively in seniors’ lives. In that regard, the person-centred care model is a new way of providing care focused on the person’s needs.

Matia Fundazioa’s purpose was looking for a new way to transmit this knowledge. To achieve that, the request was to design a serious game for direct care staff (auxiliaries, caregivers or other related) to learn about it, and apply it.

Key challenges

The topic of the project initially was very abstract and difficult to imagine visually.

I worked with 2 team mates to understand how the service in geriatric centres differed from having or not the person-centred care model. Matia Fundazioa provided access to all that information and know-how to understand the context.

We learned that the big difference between models is the freedom and choice given to seniors. Based on their mental and physical conditions, seniors were treated differently in one model and the other. For example, in the person-centred model seniors are like at home, while in the other, they are treated like patients.

The biggest challenge was to process all the complexity related to the topic in a tangible product concept.

Design process

While we gained more understanding and awareness in the topic, we arranged interviews with some key stakeholders involved in the field. These stakeholders were directors of geriatric centres, family members and others associated to the caregivers.
 
Through Matia Fundaziona we contacted a geriatric centre to conduct interviews to talk to directors and direct care staff. We also visited this centre and observed some of the daily activities.
 
With all the insights, we started to shape ideas about how to structure the information, create the content for a serious game and define a concept.
 

Key insights

We found that the actions (and precautions) of direct care staff vary depending on the physical and mental abilities of seniors. As caregivers’ tasks and responsibilities varied across these conditions, we built 4-user journey maps. Each journey represented a caregiver’s actions based on the seniors’ health conditions.

We divided the health conditions in mental and physical. So the user journeys would represent the actions and emotions of caregivers through their interactions with seniors in a day. We defined the health conditions as it follows:

  • Good physical and mental conditions.
  • Bad physical conditions (physical disabilities) and good mental conditions.
  • Good physical conditions and bad mental conditions (for example senile dementia).
  • Bad physical and mental conditions.

We mapped the caregivers experience and discovered some of the most critical situations they have to face at work. This helped us to find opportunities to apply the person-centred model.

All the information, cases, stories and situations also helped to find a great amount of content ideas for the serious game.

Shaping the design

After connect the dots of all the the information we were processing we looked for inspiration and started to produce the first wireframes.

Duolingo was our inspiration in terms of the style of questions and the use of gamification that encourages its usage and engagement.

The modality of the serious game we ideated, consisted in having a virtual senior to look after in the app.

The user would be presented with different situations in the daily life of that senior. In a quiz format, a situation would be stated, and the caregiver would have to choose the right answer. The right answer would follow the person-centred model know-how, to make the virtual senior happy.
 
The serious game would start in a basic level of difficulty, ‘taking care’ of a virtual senior with a good physical and mental condition. The challenge would be increasing by adding new virtual seniors with more delicate health conditions. The caregiver would have to know how to act in those situations following the person-centred care model.

In the final design concept we defined:

  • a section of forums where users could exchange knowledge with other caregivers as a community. 
  • a rankings section, levels upgrade and teams progress screens. 
  • a skills section that would represent skills to develop applying the person-centred care model.


All these elements would encourage the growth of caregivers to apply the knowledge using gamification. Users could see what are the skills they need to focus to keep improving.

Finally, we created a mid-fi prototype to demo the experience and test some basic features through the screens. 

The prototype was tested at a basic level with a caregiver and the feedback was very positive. They loved the format how the game was organised as well as the use of virtual characters. They liked the fact of displaying an emotional state of the virtual senior depending on the care received.

The biggest win of this design solution would not just be the way in which the complexity of knowledge was simplified. But also how seniors’ lifestyle and caregivers’ experience would improve.

Future steps

This concept would be just a starting point for development, since there was much more work to be done. Following the format, a whole set of challenges/quizzes would need to be created. 

On the other hand, the app would require more rounds of user testing and validation to refine it.

It had been an exciting project to continue developing along with the possibility of the design of a service.

The research of this concept continued later with one of my team mates doing his final master’s project with them.

Felipe MQ

Senior UX Designer