Co-creation of a Serious Game About Radiotherapy
The Department of Game Design and the Department of Women's and Children's Health at Uppsala University co-created a serious game for children undergoing radiotherapy for cancer treatment. The project has received quite a bit of attention in Swedish and local media (available in Swedish only).
Children with cancer who have to undergo radiotherapy can experience fear, because they have no prior knowledge of the treatment. One way of teaching children about the treatment and reducing their fear is to prepare them for it through serious games. Involvement of the end user in the design process within medicine is a way of ensuring that the product being developed will fit the intended user.
The method used in this study made the children active participants in the game design, and our results suggest that this method can be used by health care researchers to co-create serious games with children.
The study has been published in the JMIR Human Factors publication.