Designing Games for Stealth Health & Healthy Lifestyle Education

Abstract

Mobile games can be highly accessible and effective tools in educating and promoting children’s health education, given the significant increase in their popularity. In this paper, we describe our experience in designing mobile games for enhancing children’s knowledge of healthy diet and lifestyle. We discuss design strategies for embedding lifestyle educational content and engagement with healthcare providers into three distinct mobile games. Our findings show that the children found the games engaging and enjoyed interacting with them. This work makes an important contribution to the field of games for health. It aims to adopt a ‘stealth health’ approach to engaging people in their own health care management by leveraging a technology that is currently used and accepted by the target population.