Abstract
Acquired brain injuries (ABI) affect over 40 million people each year. Improving social functioning by training the skills needed for success in social interactions is an important, although often underrepresented part, of rehabilitation after ABI. Those who lack social functioning abilities are at risk of becoming socially isolated and typically have high levels of depression and anxiety. Therapy for social functioning after an ABI is limited, with opportunities for practise decreasing as individuals return home from in-patient care facilities. Additionally, training for social functioning is proportionally less focused on than cognitive or physical functioning.
Interactive technology could offer unchartered opportunities for administering parts of this training in an efficient way. Several successful research studies have evaluated rehabilitation of ABI using games and interactive systems. However, these studies are generally focused on the rehabilitation of cognitive and physical functioning rather than the skills needed for social functioning.
This paper presents the research carried out to design and preliminary validate a gameful application known as SocialMe. The findings of this research contribute to the area of rehabilitation of social functioning following ABI and the use of gameful intervention technology. The empirically researched design requirements, including interviews and collaboration with domain experts, presented in this paper could be a starting point for interventions for individuals with ABI as well as individuals with a need to learn or improve skills for full social functioning.
Future research will need to be carried out to develop the concept further and evaluate its clinical significance in a randomised controlled trial to see if the use of SocialMe can lead to improvements in the social skills needed for social functioning, and to support the social reintegration of individuals with ABI.
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Douch, LJ., Gozdzikowska, K., Hoermann, S. (2020). Design of a Gameful Application for Individuals with Acquired Brain Injuries to Relearn Social Functioning. In: Marfisi-Schottman, I., Bellotti, F., Hamon, L., Klemke, R. (eds) Games and Learning Alliance. GALA 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12517. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63464-3_29
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