8-year Evaluation of GameBus: Status quo in Aiming for an Open Access Platform to Prototype and Test Digital Health Apps

Abstract

Although a vast number of mobile health interventions has been discussed in the scientific literature, the scientific evidence for engineering gamified health interventions is too meager. Depending on the context, this leads to immature investments on one side of the spectrum and delayed implementations on the other side. GameBus is a web platform for increasing the rigor of gamified health experiments in living lab settings. This article clarifies the scientific design rationale of this platform and provides an eight-year evaluation of its performance. We demonstrate that a large variety of studies has been performed, leading to a promising data set for analyzing the impact of gamification techniques in the context of health promotion. While various articles on such studies have been published, along with data sets, this article shares novel information to enable other scholars to scale up such efforts. We also highlight critical gaps to guide future work on the platform.