MeetDurian: A Gameful Mobile App to Prevent COVID-19 Infection
This addresses the need for better public health education during the COVID-19 pandemic, but it is incremental as it applies gamification to an existing domain.
The authors tackled the problem of public misunderstanding of COVID-19 transmission by developing MeetDurian, a location-based gameful mobile app to improve hygiene habits and reduce virus spread, reporting experiments that demonstrate its acceptability and usability.
The COVID-19 problem has not gone away with the passing of the seasons. Even though most countries have achieved remarkable results in fighting against epidemic diseases and preventing and controlling viruses, the general public is still far from understanding the new crown virus and lacks imagination on its transmission law. In this paper, we propose MeetDurian: a cross-platform mobile application that exploits a location-based game to improve users' hygiene habits and reduce virus dispersal. We present its main features, its architecture, and its core technologies. Finally, we report a set of experiments that prove the acceptability and usability of MeetDurian. An illustrative demo of the mobile app features is shown in the following video: https://youtu.be/Vqg7nFDQuOU.