Leveraging Play to Promote Sustained Health Behavior Change

Long-term health outcomes, such as obesity and diabetes are particularly challenging to manage because they require regimented behavioral changes impacting day-to-day living for a sustained amount of time. While short-term interventions remain unsustainable for the most part, games and ubiquitous health-based technologies can play a crucial role in incentivizing healthy eating and exercise behaviors in day-to-day routine and potentially motivate players to adopt some of these small behavior changes in their lives. In this poster, we present the core design and play mechanics of a health-based social media and game environment that is designed to encourage healthy eating and exercise behaviors in players.