Service–Please: an interactive healthy eating serious game application for tablet computer

While everyone knows that we should eat healthily, translating such information into practice is a major challenge for many of us when it comes to eating well. So despite a huge increase in awareness of the implications of food-choices, obesity levels in the UK continue to increase. In this paper, we present a novel application designed to deliver psychological ‘Approach Avoidance’ training in a serious games format. Developed for tablet computers, gameplay requires players to repeatedly push unhealthy food icons away, and pull healthy food icons towards themselves. The hypothesis for the overall project is that repeated push away gestures will produce an implicit avoidance bias towards unhealthy foods, reducing players’ tendency to consume them. Previous research using a joystick controlled PC training regime has shown success with alcohol choices, however the current project offers the potential for a pervasive game based intervention using a tablet and gestures making such training more readily accessible.

Content

Author and article information

Contributors

Kenneth C. Scott-Brown

Julia Allan

Leif Azzopardi

Marjon van der Pol

Paul Crook

Mark Bamford

Claire Moncrieffe

Donna McAvoy

Ian Reynolds

Conference

Publication date: September 2012

Publication date (Print): September 2012

Pages: 381-385

Affiliations

[0001]University of Abertay Dundee

Bell St. Dundee, DD1 1HG

[0002]School of Medicine & Dentistry

University of Aberdeen, AB25 2ZD

[0003]Health Economics Research Unit

University of Aberdeen, AB25 2ZD

[0004]Mathematical & Computer Sciences

Heriot-Watt University, EH14 4AS

[0005]University of Abertay Dundee

[0006]Quartic Llama, 40 Bell St, Dundee

Article

DOI: 10.14236/ewic/HCI2012.55

SO-VID: 0fe98e50-50a2-42aa-a2fd-780b390a42ee

Copyright statement: © Kenneth C. Scott-Brown et al. Published by BCS Learning and Development Ltd. The 26th BCS Conference on Human Computer Interaction, Birmingham, UK

License:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Conference name: The 26th BCS Conference on Human Computer Interaction

Conference acronym: HCI

Conference number: 26

Conference location: Birmingham, UK

Conference date: 12 - 14 September 2012

Conference sponsor: Electronic Workshops in Computing (eWiC)

Conference theme: Human Computer Interaction

Product

Product Information: 1477-9358BCS Learning & Development

Self URI (article page): https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.14236/ewic/HCI2012.55

Self URI (journal page): https://ewic.bcs.org/

Service–Please: an interactive healthy eating serious game application for tablet computer

Abstract