An Edutainment Game Prototype for Sasang Constitutional Food Therapy

Abstract

Objective : Recently many kinds of food therapies have sprung up to prevent or manage disease and to promote health. Seeing Korean history, the Korean medical doctors have been applying food therapy based on the thought that the dietary sources were as important as the medicine. Therefore, in this study, we designed a mobile edutainment game prototype with the goal of providing education about healthy food knowledge for users who belongs to different constitutional types. Materials and Method : We adopted the Sasang Constitutional Medicine as the medical background knowledge for our edutainment game design. Based on the user study, we developed the process of edutainment system which is composed of ‘My game’, ‘My constitution’, and ‘My food’. Among the whole process, we developed a prototype for the core module – the ‘My game’ part. This prototype used a jumping game for mobile devices that is composed of training, level 1 and level 2 stages. Results : From the target user evaluation, it was proved that 1) in terms of the learning effect of healthy diet, the edutainment game we developed has a significant advantage over the conventional learning media. 2) after playing the edutainment game, the good and bad food identification accuracy based on picture and text format were increased by 44% and 42% respectively, and 3) target users perceived enjoyment while using this prototype, as well as showed positive intention to use this game as edutainment tool in the future. Conclusion : We designed and developed mobile edutainment game prototype to educate healthy food knowledge based on Sasang Constitutional Medicine. Through user evaluation, we proved that our prototype enhanced healthy food knowledge and that user accepted the prototype as a beneficial edutainment tool.