Food Pyramid Escape - A serious escape game for the support of nutritional education in Austria and beyond

Abstract

Food plays an important role in everyday life. It keeps the human metabolism up and running and can also hugely affect personal health. Despite lot´s of available food options people can choose from nowadays, some still tend to prefer unhealthy food. Such malnutrition can lead to severe medical problems like the metabolic syndrome, Diabetes mellitus, and cardiovascular diseases. Many people seem to lack nutritional knowledge and therefore often make poor food choices. Health promotion, which strives to empower people to take care of their health, aim to take effective countermeasures for aforementioned problems. Currently, most Austrian health promotion interventions only rely on information material and workshops and are mostly aimed at specific target groups (e.g. minors or the elderly). Therefore, the authors of this paper propose a serious game called “Food Pyramid Escape” which has the potential to aid health promotion in Austria and beyond. “Food Pyramid Escape” is a serious escape game that conveys nutritional knowledge by wrapping it into a coherent story, diverse riddles and mini-games and is targeted to a wide audience. The game can be used as a standalone nutrition intervention measure or together with additional information material and workshops for larger scale intervention plans.

Publication
Talk: 2021 IEEE 9th International Conference on Serious Games and Applications for Health(SeGAH), Dubai, United Arab Emirates; 08-04-2021 - 08-06-2021; in: “2021 IEEE 9th International Conference on Serious Games and Applications for Health(SeGAH)", IEEE, (2021), ISBN: 978-1-6654-2649-7; 1 - 8
Rene Baranyi
Projektass. Dipl.-Ing. Dr.techn.
Thomas Grechenig
Thomas Grechenig
Ao.Univ.Prof. Dipl.-Ing. Dr.techn.