Within the framework of this project, an innovative serious-game will be designed in order to foster the engagement of the project target and to improve the effectiveness of the VET package developed against traditional learning approaches for workers in healthcare settings. HYGEIA foresees the required amount of usable data so the game runtime, complexity and intrusiveness will be modelled and designed from the ground-up around the requirements and needs indicated by target group and experts in the field. This will allow the design of game “levels” to be modelled in a more adequate way, to provide more comprehensive results and to increase quality of data acquisition, in contrast to a number of separate paper tests or training exercises. The serious-game thus developed will be innovative for several reasons and characteristics:
a) continuous tracking of the user’s abilities;
b) determining an appropriate number of steps for the challenge to correctly train the abilities of the target user;
c) keeping up and staying “half-a-step” in front of player performance;
d) natural interaction and little-to-no learning curve;
e) engagement with a learning-by-doing exercise;
f) offering different levels of difficulty;
g) taking into account social and cultural background and technical literacy, producing a most natural game model for target demographics.
The game should be intuitive even for those workers with low digital skills. It should also be easy to be played without supervision, in order to improve engagement and allow regular usage. By using gamification features, in fact, workers will be provided with the necessary level of motivation and will be driven to reach higher training goals.
Game’s virtual interactive environment will be designed using a universal, multi-platform game engine for maximum technical transferability and even in this very first stage will run on mainstream and most affordable desktop and mobile platforms not requiring any expensive or specialist hardware.
