Abstract:

Learning and training processes in the contexts of chronic disease moves in two directions: to make patients empowered in order to allow them to recognize the behaviors that might compromise their health conditions and, to train medical and paramedical staffs on the procedures for diagnosis and patients follow-up to provide an high quality service.

The learning by doing approach, which has been shown to be effective in the contexts of acquisition of skills, was adopted in UBICARE project to support training and skills acquisition related to the patient management and handling of critical events.

A simulation component has been designed to allows the creation of simulated cases, starting from the actual data stored in the medical records of patients to:
• train the medical and paramedical staff;
• train the patient in an edugame environment to identify problems and empower him in the management of his health status;
• allow specialist staff to use data analysis on real data for the detection of critical events in the different clinical profiles.

In order to reach the first two objective, the Gamification approach, which is the use of the mechanics and game rules (points, levels, lives, charts, etc) to enhance the interactive user experience and actively engage users in areas such as marketing, politics, health and e-learning, has been used. The results were two sub-components: the Simulation of clinical cases and the Edugame.
In particular, the simulation of clinical cases offers different learning goal for each professional role. In addition, to ensure the scalability of the system a training role has been implemented which can create new problems by entering new relationships among clinical data. When the simulation starts a new problem is set up based on actual monitoring parameters and patient's medical records. The system will show possible actions to be taken, classified into Actions, Therapy, Examinations. The possible actions change according to the player profile (patient, nurse, doctor ...) to fit their skills. The time and score have been used as gamification mechanisms: a limited time is available to choose the appropriate action during which if the appropriate action is not taken, the patient gets worse.

The edugames have the same educational goals of the simulation of clinical cases but they are defined by the medical and/or paramedical staff on the basis of users specific needs. Because of their static scenarios, the edugames are mainly addressed to patients who need to change their attitudes to adopt an appropriate lifestyle according to their health status, and their caregivers who have to acquire skills related both daily activities management and critical event handling.

In addition to the game-based learning approach the learning by doing approach is proposed also in the simulated data analysis that is addressed to specialist staff. The user can make simulations of real or pseudo-real data in order to identify correlations among the monitoring parameters and specific disease complications. The component, using an OLAP system, will be equipped with a data warehouse containing actual data and/or pseudo-real ones about the different clinical profiles on which multidimensional data analysis can be performed. The result of this analysis will produce reports that can be shared and discussed within the UBICARE community in order to point out new interpretations of data.

Keywords:

Gamification, learning by doing, simulation.