Improving diabetes health symptoms by designing a specialized VR gamification self-care method: How games affect behaviors

Self-care has an important role in improving the level of health in patients diagnosed with chronic illnesses such as diabetes. This study is an effort to develop a self-care system using gamification in a virtual reality (VR) environment, and to evaluate its effects on improving diabetic patients’ metabolic symptoms, such as fasting blood sugar (FBS) and HbA1c, as well as behavioral variables such as physical activity and healthy food regiment. At the first step, a VR game was designed. Then, the effect of the game was compared to other self-care methods. Participants were randomly assignedto four experimental groups. Each group encountered a different type of intervention for a time period of six weeks. Symptoms were measured and the differences were calculated and analyzed accordingly using repeated measure Anova. There is a significant difference observed for behavioral variables: physical activity (.003), food intake (.002). for FBS, the interaction between time and grouping variable was significantly different (.023). No statistically significant differences were observed across the four groups for BMI and HBA1C.