Design and Evaluation of Tamhattan: A multimodal game promoting awareness of health in a social and positive way

Progress in the field of human-technology interaction offers interesting possibilities to promote health through gaming. The authors' objective was to carry out user-centered research to develop an interactive game called Tamhattan that was designed to promote health awareness of adolescents. The interactive gaming environment enables gaming in both mobile and PC contexts with games based on health knowledge. The platform supports socially networked gaming and learning. It enables input with game controls, positioning (GPS), and gestures, as well as multimodal feedback through visual and auditive modalities. The research started with a survey of the health issues that should be addressed in the games. Adolescents were engaged in design and testing of the games throughout the process. Finally, the gaming environment was used in actual teaching contexts in local schools. The results of these user and gaming experience studies are presented and discussed.