Service-please: an interactive healthy eating serious game application for tablet computer

Kenneth C. Scott-Brown, Marjon van der Pol, Claire Moncrieffe, Julia Allan, Paul Crook, Donna McAvoy, Leif Azzopardi, Mark Bamford, Ian Reynolds

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution book

Abstract

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.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationBCS-HCI '12 Proceedings of the 26th Annual BCS Interaction Specialist Group Conference on People and Computers
Place of PublicationSwinton, UK
PublisherBritish Computer Society
Pages381-385
Number of pages5
Publication statusPublished - 2012

Publication series

NameBCS-HCI '12
PublisherBritish Computer Society

Keywords

  • healthy eating
  • tablet computers
  • serious games
  • pervasive computing
  • marmalade
  • iPad

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