Poster Information
| Title | The Wellness Partners collaboration: Intervention and study design from scratch |
| Presenter(s) | Marientina Gotsis, Maryalice Jordan-Marsh, William Graner, Jamie Antonisse, Diana Hughes, Donna Spruijt-Metz, Hua Wang and Thomas Valente |
| Session | Conference Reception, Game Exhibition, and Poster Session |
| Time | Thursday, October 21, 7:00p-9:00p |
| Location | East Lansing Technology Innovation Center |
| Format | Poster Presentation |
| Description | Multidisciplinary projects between creative and scientific disciplines commonly face project funding sources that enforce an implicit hierarchy of importance in roles, budget, inspiration, methodology and outcomes. In the blossoming field of games for health, who is the chicken and who is the egg? Designers or scientists? Experts from either side are often treated as follows in grant proposals and budgets: "insert yourself and what you do here". This can be result of restricted timelines and budgets. True collaboration to reach convergence costs extra money and time. Herein we present a post-mortem of the Wellness Partners (WP) collaboration funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Pioneer portfolio.
The WP team sought to blur the lines of disciplines as much as possible and was given a generous opportunity to "play" together in order to find answers to some of our questions. The grant title "Effectiveness of Social Mobile Networked Games in Promoting Active Lifestyles for Wellness" was from its inception ambitious in scope yet coy in what it promised to be able to answer. The freshly convened WP team attempted to design organically a grant, a study and an intervention. Almost three years later, the project is bearing fruit. The aim of the WP study was to assess the effectiveness of a social web-based game as a lifestyle change intervention in private networks of families and friends. Parallel design of the intervention and the study from the beginning was an exercise of our own team's self-efficacy, efficiency and social support. We outline the inception of intervention and study parameters and how they evolved together, as well as how we tried to preserve the integrity of hypotheses and research questions. We sought to empower adults to meet their lifestyle change goals, independent of their gender and generation characteristics, using a combination of social games for the web. We investigated the feasibility of a cross-gender, intergenerational social web-based game for lifestyle change and ways in which players respond socially to the game play experience. We designed a web-based interactive intervention that was piloted at the University of Southern California on 54 groups of 154 participants of friends and families. Groups were randomly assigned to one of two versions of the intervention for 5 weeks and then switched to the other condition for another 5 weeks. Participants in condition A were given points for self-reporting physical activity or setbacks. Points could be redeemed for activities for a virtual animated character, which resulted in memories. Some activities resulted in gifts that could be sent to others within the group. Participants in condition B did not receive points for self-reporting physical activity or setbacks and the interface did not include the animated character. Participants in both conditions could see each other's reporting, activity status and send messages within the group. Although most participants thought the WP application had good potential and their overall experience was positive, they also pointed out many features and functionalities that they had expected or hoped to enjoy. |