Space Mission Sanitas: Integrating physical activity into the daily life of cardiac patients - A persuasive game during rehabilitation

Abstract

Space Mission Sanitas is a game-based health intervention to help cardiac patients maintain their physical activity level after cardiac rehabilitation. Often people find it hard to maintain their physical activity level after cardiac rehabilitation. They face different barriers that lower their motivation, resulting in an unhealthy lifestyle with low physical activity.

This project is done in collaboration with the Capri Hartrevalidatie centre. The target group for this project are the participants that are rehabilitating here. The people that come to the rehabilitation training are often open to a lifestyle change but need guidance on how to achieve this. A part of the participants are people with a low socio-economy position(SEP), for them, it is even harder to maintain their physical activity after rehabilitation.
To integrate physical activity into the daily life of cardiac patients, a game-based health intervention is designed and tested in this project. All participants in cardiac rehabilitation can take part in this game, including participants with a low Socioeconomic position(SEP). When designing the game, the barriers of people with a low SEP were considered. The game is a tool to motivate physical behaviour in the gamified world so that the experienced physical activity for the game will motivate people to perform this behaviour in the real world.
To design this game-based health intervention, a user-based literature study and a context field study were conducted. A deeper understanding of the participants’ drivers and barriers view on physical activity and needs and motivation during and after rehabilitation were gained. By combining the insights, a behaviour analysis and a user persona could be made of the target group. A design brief, including a design goal, vision and design opportunities were set up. The design goal of this project is to develop a persuasive game that supports the maintenance of physical activity in cardiac patients’ daily life by stimulating their sense of competence, relatedness, and autonomy. From the behaviour analysis, the three elements: competence, relatedness and autonomy resulted in important factors of motivation for physical activity. In the ideation and conceptualization phase of this project, the game-based health intervention got its shape. Co-creation sessions, interviews and expert validations were conducted to find the best concept direction. This led to the final design: Space Mission Sanitas.

Space Mission Sanitas is a game where six teams are challenged during the cardiac rehabilitation period to achieve their weekly fuel goal. This fuel goal needs to be reached to provide their space shuttle with enough fuel to complete the overall mission. The fuel goal can be seen as a metaphor for a weekly physical activity goal since the goals are related to physical exercise they can practice in their daily life context. Every week during the training, they will evaluate which team has achieved their fuel goal and every week they will draw and select a new fuel card for the coming week.

Finally, an evaluation cycle of one week, showed that the game had a positive effect on people their sense of competence, relatedness, and autonomy. This suggests that the game has a promising effect on the maintenance of physical activity after rehabilitation. In future research, the game will be tested over a period of six weeks to measure the actual effect on people’s physical activity maintenance. The variety of insights gathered in this project can be used in future CR research and CR health interventions.