Stephanie Jansen – Kosterink

As evidence-based medicine is regarded as a requirement for acceptance of a new treatment, such as Games for Health, it is important to execute proper clinical evaluations to convince professionals, policy makers and insurance companies about its implementation. Randomized Controlled Trials (RCT) are considered as the gold standard for evaluating the safety and effectiveness of medical interventions. However, the characteristics of an RCT do not match well with the clinical evaluation of Games for Health. The aim of the presentation is to provided two golden rules that should be taken into account during the preparation of a proper evaluation for Games for Health.
Firstly, the type of evaluation should be tailored to the development life cycle of the game. The development of games is an iterative process and starts with the evaluation of new games on an application level and ends with the evaluation of mature games on a global level. Secondly, the true potential of Games for Health can only be evaluated when these games are implemented in the daily clinical setting. The added value of games are related to the clinical aim and the way a games is implemented in a daily clinical setting.
Off course, to follow these rules the traditional study designs are not sufficient and we have to focus on other designs to evaluate games. Innovative study design such as, cohort multiple randomized controlled trails and stepped wedge cluster randomized trials.

PRESENTATION

We need a change of mind – Transforming the clinical evaluation for Games for Health.

With a background in human movement science (VU University Amsterdam) Stephanie joined RRD in October 2008 as a research assistant on the MoyTel project. After this project she continued working for RRD as PhD student in the field of telemedicine. End 2014 she successfully defended her PhD thesis: “The added value of telemedicine service for physical rehabilitation”. She worked/works on a number of European and National projects, including MyoTel, CLEAR, PLAYMANCER, Condition Coach, NavMem, PERSSILAA, eWALL, Langgezond.nl and GOAL. In 2015 Stephanie past her GCP-WMO exam (BROK-registration) and since 2016 she is a member of the METC Twente. Her work mainly focusses on the (clinical) evaluation of telemedicine service.