Narrating Routines through Game Dynamics: Impact of a Gamified Routine Management App for Autistic Individuals

Title of the Paper

Narrating Daily Habits and Game Dynamics: A Gamified Daily Management Application for Individuals with Autism

Bibliographic Information

• Topic Area: Assistive technology for individuals with autism, health applications, gamification design
• Keywords: Autism, daily management, gamified application, field study, health behavior, mobile application, daily habits, design recommendations

Research Background and Issues

• Identified Problems or Challenges:

  • Individuals with autism often face challenges in establishing and maintaining healthy daily habits due to their unique behavioral characteristics and preferences. This can lead to habitual inactivity, resulting in issues such as obesity, hyperlipidemia, and hypertension.
  • Current mobile technologies designed to assist individuals with autism primarily focus on basic self-help functions, lacking detailed designs for personalized daily habit management.
  • Commercial daily management applications often lack clear operational guidance and are overly flexible for autism users, making sustained usage difficult.
  • Research on system design for individuals with autism tends to emphasize validating design novelty, with insufficient focus on long-term performance and effectiveness in practical use.

• Importance of the Research:

  • Maintaining healthy daily habits is crucial for ensuring emotional, physical, and social well-being.
  • Improving the health behaviors and daily habits of individuals with autism is vital for their long-term quality of life.

• Research Motivation and Related Work:

  • Gamification design has been shown to enhance user engagement in health behaviors and improve self-efficacy.
  • Individuals with autism exhibit strong preferences for visual reasoning and predictive interfaces, offering potential for designing assistive mobile applications.
  • Existing research indicates that connecting various daily habits (e.g., physical activity, diet, sleep) can more effectively support health behaviors.

Solution

• Method or Solution:

  • Develop the gamified application “RoutineAid” to support individuals with autism in autonomously establishing four key daily habits:
    1. Physical Activity (PA)
    2. Dietary Habits
    3. Mindfulness Practice
    4. Sleep
  • The application design incorporates visual storytelling and various gamification elements, such as task mechanisms, ranking systems, and reward mechanisms.

• Innovative Features:

  • Integration of four core daily habit modules, showcasing their interconnected relationships.
  • Motivation enhancement through gamification and narrative design: rewarding completed tasks by upgrading virtual village buildings and unlocking village characters.
  • Incorporation of feedback from stakeholders (e.g., professionals, parents, individuals with autism) to design structured and personalized management features.

• Implementation Steps and Key Technologies:

  • Present the four habit modules as a “village,” visually displaying task completion progress and outcomes.
  • Set key tasks (e.g., walking 30 minutes daily) and auxiliary tasks (e.g., jumping rope 100 times) to support habit formation.
  • Provide periodic reminders (e.g., push notifications), health tips, and a log function for users to review and reflect.

Research Outcomes

• Specific Outcomes:

  • During a 9-week field study, the application effectively enhanced participants’ self-efficacy, health behaviors, and consistency in daily habits.
  • Significant improvements in sleep patterns were observed, including reduced time to fall asleep and increased total sleep duration.
  • Mindfulness recording guided participants in emotional expression, promoting improved self-reflection capabilities.

• Comparison with Existing Solutions and Advantages:

  • Unlike single-function health habit management tools, RoutineAid systematically integrates components for physical activity, diet, mindfulness, and sleep, validating the interactive effects of these components.
  • Gamification and narrative design enhanced user engagement and made daily management more enjoyable.

• Experimental or Evaluation Results:

  • Significant improvement in self-efficacy (effect size 𝑑=0.63, 𝑝<0.05).
  • Participants showed significant increases in physical activity (including step counts and low-intensity activities) and statistically significant improvements in sleep quality.
  • Emotional recording demonstrated a noticeable positive transition, with a significant reduction in stress levels.

• Limitations and Future Directions:

  • Some participants struggled to complete high-intensity physical activity tasks (e.g., long-distance running), suggesting the need for alternative tasks or adaptive difficulty settings.
  • The study participants had sufficient cognitive abilities to understand the research objectives and application functions, which may limit applicability to individuals with severe autism requiring complex support.
  • Future recommendations include expanding the narrative depth of the application, such as integrating real-time scenarios like weather conditions to provide a more immersive experience.