Serious Games to Improve Quality of Life

Motivation of the Track:

Gamification techniques and serious games are often used to capture and maintain user’s attentions. This is particularly important when dealing with young patients or people with special needs. Patient’s collaboration is crucial for doctors to perform a good diagnosis, and to provide an efficient therapy, but it cannot always be taken for granted. Moreover, serious games are proved to be an efficient tool to incentivize people to improve their lifestyle, e.g., making more physical activity. This track will feature new insights, research, and practice on how to design, develop and use gamification and persuasive technologies to create serious games and applications to improve individuals’ Quality of Life (QoL) and behavior, with a particular focus on people with disabilities.

The track targets researchers, doctoral students, practitioners and other people interested in presenting, discussing, reflecting and networking on central themes associated with the development and use of serious games and applications to help people with special needs. Papers on both theoretical aspects and design method of gamification techniques and serious games are welcomed, which describe and evaluate novel design methods and system prototypes. In addition, the track welcomes full research and work in progress papers and educational cases.

Topics of the Track:

Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

• Serious game design for better lifestyle promotion
• Serious games for people with disability
• Games for Education and Learning
• Gamification
• Pervasive Systems
• Assistive Technologies
• Persuasive solutions
• Methods, models and principles for gamification design
• Usability and accessibility issues
• Games for Health and Well-Being
• Serious Games for social inclusion

Co-chairs:

Ombretta Gaggi, (Università di Padova, Italy)
Matteo Ciman, (University of Geneva, Switzerland)

Technical Program Committee:

• Armir Bujari, University of Padua, Italy
• Claudio Palazzi, University of Padua, Italy
• Dario Maggiorini, University of Milan, Italy
• Elif Surer, Middle East Technical University, Çankaya, Turkey
• Eric Medvet, University of Trieste, Italy

• Fabio Pittarello, University Ca' Foscari of Venice, Italy
• Flaminia Luccio, University Ca' Foscari of Venice, Italy
• Katarzyna wac, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
• Luc Geurts, e-Medialab, Belgium
• Thomas Bjorner, Aalborg University, Denmark
• Umberto Castellani, University of Verona
• Zeljka Mihajlovic, University of Zagreb, Croatia
• Daniele Ronzani, University of Padua, Italy
• Giacomo Quadrio, University of Padua, Italy