Social gamification systems have shown potential for promoting healthy lifestyles, but applying them to occupational settings faces unique design challenges. While occupational settings offer natural communities for social interaction, fairness issues due to heterogeneous personal goals and privacy concerns increase the difficulty of designing engaging games. We explored a two-level game-design, where the first level related to achieving personal goals and the second level was a privacy-protected social competition to maximize goal compliance among colleagues. The solution was strengthened by employing occupational physicians who personalized users’ goals and coached them remotely. The design was evaluated in a 5-month study with 53 employees from a Dutch university. Results suggested that the application helped half of the participants to improve their lifestyles, and most appreciated the role of the physician in goal-setting. However, long-term user engagement was undermined by the scalability-motivated design choice of one-way communication between employees and their physician. Implications for social gamification design in occupational health are discussed.
The progressive aging of the population and the consequent growth of individuals with neurological diseases and related chronic disabilities, will lead to a general increase in the costs and resources needed to ensure treatment and care services. In this scenario, telemedicine and e-health solutions, including remote monitoring and rehabilitation, are attracting increasing interest as tools to ensure the sustainability of the healthcare system or, at least, to support the burden for health care facilities. Technological advances in recent decades have fostered the development of dedicated and innovative Information and Communication Technology (ICT) based solutions, with the aim of complementing traditional care and treatment services through telemedicine applications that support new patient and disease management strategies. This is the background for the REHOME project, whose technological solution, presented in this paper, integrates innovative methodologies and devices for remote monitoring and rehabilitation of cognitive, motor, and sleep disorders associated with neurological diseases. One of the primary goals of the project is to meet the needs of patients and clinicians, by ensuring continuity of treatment from healthcare facilities to the patient’s home. To this end, it is important to ensure the usability of the solution by elderly and pathological individuals. Preliminary results of usability and user experience questionnaires on 70 subjects recruited in three experimental trials are presented here.
This paper describes the MARKOS (the MARKet for Open Source) European Project, a FP7-ICT-2011-8 STREP project, which aims to realize a service and an interactive application providing an integrated view on the open source projects available on the web, focusing on functional, structural, and licenses aspects of software source code. MARKOS involves 7 partners from 5 countries, including industries, universities, and research institutions. MARKOS differs from other services available on the Web - which often provide textual-based code search - in that it provides the possibility to browse the code structure at a high level of abstraction, in order to facilitate the understanding of the software from a technical point of view. Also, it highlights relationships between software components released by different projects, giving an integrated view of the available Open Source software at a global scale. Last, but not least, MARKOS is able to highlight potential legal issues due to license incompatibilities, providing explanations for these issues and supporting developers in the search for alternative solutions to their problems. MARKOS will involve end users in order to allow to practice its results in scenarios coming from industrial and Open Source communities
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