Serious games for mental health promotion in adolescents with chronic diseases: a scoping review
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to synthesize the existing serious games designed to promote mental health in adolescents with chronic illnesses.
Design/methodology/approach
This study conducted a review following the guidelines of Joanna Briggs Institute and Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for Scoping Reviews. Searches were conducted in databases PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, Cochrane Library, cumulative index to nursing and allied health literature, PsycINFO, China national knowledge infrastructure Wanfang, VIP Database for Chinese Technical Periodicals and SinoMed from inception to February 12, 2023.
Findings
A total of 14 studies (describing 14 serious games) for improving the mental health of adolescents with chronic diseases were included. Of all the included games, 12 were not described as adopting any theoretical framework or model. The main diseases applicable to serious games are cancer, type 1 diabetes and autism spectrum disorder. For interventional studies, more than half of the study types were feasibility or pilot trials. Furthermore, the dosage of serious games also differs in each experiment. For the game elements, most game elements were in the category “reward and punishment features” (n = 50) and last was “social features” (n = 4).
Originality/value
Adolescence is a critical period in a person’s physical and mental development throughout life. Diagnosed with chronic diseases during this period will cause great trauma to the adolescents and their families. Serious game interventions have been developed and applied to promote the psychological health field of healthy adolescents. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to scope review the serious game of promoting mental health in the population of adolescents with chronically ill. At the same time, the current study also extracted and qualitatively analyzed the elements of the serious game.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
Funding statement: The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by: King’s-PKUHSC Joint Institute for Medical Research (grant numbers BMU2021KCL003), Joint International Research Center of Translational and Clinical Research and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) (grant number 72074008).
Declaration of conflicting interests: The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Data availability statement: The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author (ML) or the first author (YW) upon reasonable request.
Ethics approval statement: There is no need for ethical considerations in this article.
Citation
Wu, Y., Long, T., Huang, J., Zhang, Y., Zhang, Q., Zhang, J. and Li, M. (2024), "Serious games for mental health promotion in adolescents with chronic diseases: a scoping review", Mental Health Review Journal, Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead-of-print. https://doi.org/10.1108/MHRJ-07-2023-0038
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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