VazaZika: A Software Platform for Surveillance and Control of Mosquito-Borne Diseases

On Gamifying an Existing Software System: Method, Conceptual Model and Lessons Learned

“…Unfortunately, they provide little insights about the key activities required to gamify existing systems. Examples of key activities are: (i) the refinement of functional and non-functional requirements previously elicited for the existing system, and (ii) the identification of technological and architectural constraints that hinder the incorporation of certain game elements and rules (18,61). We could not find any method that has been successfully employed to gamify one or more existing systems and, therefore, have been shown applicable in practice.…”

“…By monitoring the reports of mosquito breeding sites in real time, public health agents can track disease outbreak and eliminate mosquito breeding sites. After years of system deployment, we observed a lack of user engagement that affected the number of reports (18,61). Thus, public health agents found hard to guide their work through these reports.…”

“…Aimed to leverage the user engagement, we gamified VazaDengue for making it enjoyable and challenging to potential users. The resulting gamified system is called VazaZika (18). We expect that VazaZika, with its game elements and rules, will increase the number of reports.…”

“…Usually, the incorporation of game elements and rules into an existing system follows the definition of a conceptual gamification model (68). This model specifies the interactions of users and game elements into the system through game rules (18,61).…”

“…However, gamifying an existing system is much harder than simply using a gamification library. In fact, incorporating game elements and rules into an existing system often requires many changes in system requirements, design, implementation, and test suites (18,61). Most of these changes are required even when incorporating the simplest game elements, such as points and badges.…”