In healthcare, the stakes are high. But a little play can become that serious solution we’ve been looking for. Gamification in healthcare fosters positive behavior change by encouraging activities, making them feel less like a to-do and more like an exciting quest.
As a health intervention and education method, gamified elements have already become a fixture in the healthcare industry. The global healthcare gamification market is expected to grow from $4.4 billion in 2024 to $10.8 billion in 2032, driven by the rising incidence rate of lifestyle-related and chronic diseases.
In this article, we’ll peer into:
- What healthcare gamification is and the psychological underpinnings behind it.
- How to implement gamification in healthcare to overcome associated risks and challenges.
- Successful examples of gamification in healthcare apps and trends to follow.
What is gamification in healthcare?
Healthcare gamification can be defined as the application of game-based elements, principles, and design strategies to non-game healthcare contexts. In healthcare, the appeal of games drives positive health behavior changes and promotes active learning in healthcare education and training environments.
Due to the complexity of health behavior change and learning, the concept of healthcare gamification encompasses more than just leaderboards, rewards, and other gamified elements. It builds upon a multidimensional design philosophy that integrates both human psychology and the unique dynamics of the healthcare sector.
Why does healthcare gamification work? Psychological and behavioral science foundations
Multiple studies demonstrate the empirical evidence of gamification’s positive effect on patient and clinical outcomes. The success of gamified interventions in each instance depends on how well they play into core psychological drivers and behavioral mechanisms. In other words, to nudge people into better habits, it’s important to appeal to both logic and emotion.
Below, we’ve listed the key motivational theories and behavior change models that shape successful healthcare gamification theories.
| Foundation area | Underpinning | How it works in healthcare gamification |
|---|---|---|
| Motivation and engagement | Self-Determination Theory (SDT) | Gamification can transform initially external motivation into internal motivation by aligning with three basic psychosocial needs: the need for competence, autonomy, and relatedness. |
| Flow Theory | Long-term motivation is only possible when gamified tasks are challenging enough to motivate the user, but not too difficult to deter them. | |
| Behavioral change | Transtheoretical Model (TTM) | The gamification approach should reflect the user’s readiness for behavior change (gentle nudges vs long-term rewards). |
| Reinforcement Theory | Users are more likely to proceed with a desired action when they are rewarded or incentivized for it. | |
| Social Cognitive Theory | Role models (peer influence), feedback, and rewards boost users’ confidence and motivation to keep on track with healthy behaviors. | |
| Goal Setting Theory | Progress tracking of clear and personalized goals keeps users committed to healthy behaviors. | |
| Cognitive and emotional factors | Sociocultural Learning Theory | People learn better when they interact with others (social features, progress sharing, etc.) |
| Narrative and storytelling | Themed journeys and stories make health behaviors more fun to stick with. |
These models also outline a direction for designing gamified health apps. They provide developers with a theoretical framework for identifying triggers to prioritize, personalizing gamification elements, and sustaining engagement over the long term.
Key use cases of gamification in healthcare
When one thinks of gamified experiences in healthcare, their mind likely reverts to physical activity and weight loss apps. However, gamification in healthcare can be applied on a much larger scale, improving chronic disease management, medical skills, and other behaviors — one point, one ‘ding’, one achievement at a time.
Patient education and behavior change
Learning and memorizing information is much more effective when delivered in an interactive format. Quizzes, badges, and progress bars help healthcare providers get the necessary information across to the patients and make sure it sticks. For example, awareness campaigns often reinforce the message with interactive learning models like mini-games.
Smoking cessation apps, vaccination awareness applications, and other healthcare applications that target behavior change often rely on play-to-learn experiences to transform health education into a learning adventure rather than a lecture.
Chronic disease management
In the US, chronic diseases are the primary cause of illness, disability, and death. To tackle these daunting statistics, the healthcare system needs to encourage patients to take a more active role in their treatment and self-management, a challenge that can be addressed through gamification.
Chronic disease apps like Kaia Health and Mysugr reward users with points, badges, or progress streaks for adhering to their routines and achieving daily goals. These gamified elements not only make daily self-care more enjoyable but also promote better medication adherence and deliberate self-monitoring, which are vital to long-term condition management.
Mental health and wellness
In mental health, wellness, and emotional health apps, gamification can also serve as a gentle coping mechanism, especially for users who lack the drive of their own to manage stress, anxiety, or emotional well-being. For example, for individuals with depressive symptoms, game-like elements, like mood tracking rewards and progress streaks, can make up for reward-processing deficit, also known as anhedonia.
Game mechanics, such as quests, power-ups, and science-backed mini-games, help users build resilience through positive reinforcement, level up their stress management skills, and even reframe anxiety management as an achievable outcome.
Physical rehabilitation and therapy
The physical therapy space is not new to gamification, as games have long been used to make therapy, especially for pediatric patients, more engaging in the clinic. Gamified healthcare apps leverage that experience exponentially and extend it beyond healthcare facilities to ensure patients adhere to their prescribed treatment at home.
Typically, gamified rehabilitation apps combine motion recognition and computer vision to embed gamified elements directly into the app experience. They score every rep based on real-time data, rank patients on a friendly leaderboard, and engage patients in multiplayer challenges. Along with peer influence, apps like Augment Therapy and Restore Skills also introduce levels, story-driven missions, virtual rewards, and adaptive difficulty levels to transform regular exercises into quests, thereby improving health outcomes at home.
Fitness and preventive care
Unlike other healthcare apps, the goal of bringing the game mechanics into preventive care and fitness apps is to prevent individuals from getting sick in the first place. However, many people lack the energy or motivation to maintain a healthy lifestyle. By tapping into both external rewards and internal drives, fitness and wellness apps keep the dopamine flowing throughout the process while performing their core functions.
To achieve these goals, such apps use a combination of personalized progress tracking, virtual challenges, variable-ratio rewards, micro-on-ramps, social structures, and other hooks. Altogether, these gamification techniques allow apps like Strava, WHOOP, and Gentler Streak, among others, to make skipping a workout feel like leaving mid-game.
Medical training and simulation for professionals
Beyond health-related goals, game elements also transform the way healthcare professionals acquire and improve their medical knowledge. When applied to learning activities, gamification enhances learning retention while also bridging theory with practice.
In medical education, game mechanics can flex to fit the discipline. For example, a timed rapid-series game or progressive escape rooms can help radiology residents practice their diagnostic skills. Surgery residents can master medical procedures through ‘boss-level’ VR simulations, while emergency‑medicine learners can nail their skills with branching case-based games and medication-dosing speed runs in tow.
Gamification techniques and tools in healthcare, based on real-world healthcare apps
Below, we’ve listed popular delivery formats of gamification in healthcare grouped by the core game mechanics they enable.
Motivation and progress
This group of techniques is designed to enhance user engagement with the application and promote behavioral changes by adjusting goals based on relevant patient data and providing visual indicators of achievement.
Dynamic goal-setting with adaptive difficulty
The system adjusts the difficulty of the task to match the user’s real-time performance, in-game behavior patterns, and health status to keep it challenging yet attainable for the user.
Example: Omada Health provides supplemental chronic disease management support between clinical visits. As a part of its gamification strategy, the application adjusts care pathways and behavioral goals based on real-time user input and condition (e.g., prediabetes, hypertension, prevention).
Visual progress arcs and narrative journeys
Structuring progress as coherent storylines or arcs keeps the user invested in the hero’s journey, while the narrative framing creates emotional stakes and advances the user through milestones and narrative checkpoints.
Example: Backed by medical and mental health experts, Reframe Health is an innovative alcohol-related habit change mobile app that banks on the narrative-based CBT, along with gamified journeys and checkpoints, for alcohol reduction and recovery.
Habit loops and streak mechanics
These game mechanics tap into our deep-seated urge for consistency, FOMO, and forward movement by creating positive reinforcement for consistent behaviors. However, if overused, these habit-forming features can create a source of anxiety, so it’s essential to couple streaks with gentle accountability elements like forgiveness buffers or grace periods.
Example: Using structured, gamified habit formation, Sidekick Health makes it easier for users to build healthy habits for managing chronic diseases. The application reinforces daily health habits through in-app streak tracking and reminders to keep users on track.
Reward systems
Rewards and incentives add an extra layer of value to healthy behavior and create a positive association with healthy actions. This makes users more likely to continue using the app and maintain those healthy behaviors.
Real-world rewards
Some healthcare applications tie in-app progress to tangible perks such as discounts on health products, fitness gear, or even insurance benefits. By providing these external motivators, apps create the groundwork for behavior change before intrinsic motivation fully takes over.
Example: In collaboration with insurers, the wellness platform Vitality Health rewards users with Vitality Points for verified health actions such as screenings and appointments. These points can then be redeemed for discounts on health products, travel, and other services.
In-app currencies tied to real health outcomes
Some healthcare applications give users digital currency in exchange for consistent adherence to health goals or treatments. Usually, users can redeem it for real-world perks.
Example: The Wellth app rewards patients for healthy habits by offering monetary incentives, such as gift cards, for completing key health behaviors, including glucose monitoring, daily logging, and medication adherence.
Social and community mechanics
Borrowed from social media, this technique enables users to track and share their milestones and activities with other community members. The ability to showcase their wins, both small and big, triggers core motives, such as accountability, social proof, and collective identity, keeping users engaged in healthy habits.
Example: By placing this gamification concept at the core of its experience, the PatientsLikeMe platform encourages patients to share their progress toward treatment milestones with peers on similar health journeys.
Feedback and personalization
Personalized gamification adjusts the underlying interactive layers to the user’s unique context, including their health status, goals, preferences, and daily routines. The winning combination of personalization and gamification enables the app to factor in multiple motivation-related cues and tailor each gamified element accordingly.
Biofeedback-driven gameplay
Wearable or embedded sensors stream EEG, EMG, heart rate, and other physiological data into the healthcare application. Building on this data, the application dynamically adjusts the difficulty, targets, or visuals to match the user’s current capacity and capabilities.
Example: The MindMaze game platform delivers game-like therapies and assessment tools for rehabilitation and treatment of neurodegenerative diseases and brain injuries, based on real-time brain and motion data.
AI-based coaching avatars
Powered by conversational AI, virtual health coaches draw on both dynamic data, such as language cues and user sentiment, and historical health data, including health goals and past interactions, to shape the interaction in real-time and deliver relevant guidance.
Example: Wysa, an AI-powered mental health chatbot, leverages conversational AI to steer the dialogue toward the right mindfulness or CBT exercise. This experience is accompanied by light gamified progress tracking, which turns each completed exercise into a tangible achievement.
Micro-feedback loops and nudges
Healthcare applications can also layer in supportive check-ins that pop up right before or after a target action. Unlike generic reminders, just-in-time nudges are immediately relevant, which means they have a higher chance of pulling users into the moment.
Example: Lark Health is a personalized coaching app that provides contextually relevant coaching nudges for managing chronic conditions and transforms daily routines into iterative improvement cycles.
Immersion and experience
Often powered by augmented reality and virtual reality technologies, immersive gamification places patients or healthcare providers in game-like worlds and interactive environments for therapeutic purposes, learning, or other objectives. When supplemented with motion tracking and real‑time biofeedback, immersive experiences can dynamically adapt to the user in real time.
Mixed reality in therapeutic applications
Calming or game-like visuals can serve as a distraction from acute pain or a controlled buffer between the patient and the feared stimulus. For medical professionals, mixed reality creates realistic learning environments, such as overlaying holographic anatomy on a mannequin, that allow them to practice their skills with a realistic feel and spatial accuracy.
Example: Karuna Labs’ Virtual Embodiment Training places patients in immersive scenarios, where they practice graded, pain-free exercises and mindfulness tasks in a safe environment, supplemented with positive visual and proprioceptive feedback.
Audio gamification for accessibility in therapy
Not all users can benefit from visual gamification equally. In some cases, such as beat-driven movement therapy, speech therapy, or motor therapy, visual game elements don’t offer the most optimal experience. Audio gamification, like sound cues, voice feedback, and spatial audio, addresses both accessibility and therapy needs.
Example: Companion App by Ellipsis Health supports users with depression and anxiety through voice-based journaling and feedback.
Challenges and limitations of implementing gamification in healthcare settings
Gamified elements can significantly impact patient outcomes, promote positive health changes, and aid medical students in developing clinical skills. But applying this healthcare technology comes with a few challenges.
Clinical validation and outcome measurement
One of the biggest challenges of applying game mechanics in healthcare apps is proving that they deliver on their promise of improving outcomes. Gamification is usually tied to health-related behavioral consequences or psychological outcomes, which are difficult to measure in studies.
Additionally, clinical validation must be conducted over a long-term period, as these behavioral and physiological changes can unfold over months or even years. The diversity of patient populations and the differences in responses further complicate clinical validation of gamification for healthcare companies.
Ethical concerns around manipulation and dependency
By design, gamification can interfere with personal decision-making processes, driving health change more through rewards than through intrinsic motivation. Streak mechanics, competitive leaderboards, and other game-based elements can also trigger additional anxiety or lead to an obsession with tracking behaviors.
That’s why it’s important to combine elements rooted in intrinsic motivation with those playing into external stimuli, design flexible streak mechanics, and regularly monitor the physiological impact of the application.
Regulatory requirements and medical device classification
Health gamification solutions often run in a gray zone when it comes to regulatory requirements. If a gamified app impacts the clinical decision-making processes of individuals or is designed for diagnosing, treating, and managing the disease, regulatory bodies such as the FDA or EMA may qualify them as software as a medical device.
Once the app falls into the SaMD category, healthcare organizations have to fulfill requirements related to documentation, the development process, clinical evidence, and post-market surveillance.
Data privacy in highly personalized gamified systems
To personalize gamified interactions, the system needs to collect and analyze a combination of sensitive health and behavioral data, as well as real-time data such as geolocation. If mishandled, such data can expose users to data breaches, identity theft, and other incidents.
That’s why gamified healthcare apps must include solid data security mechanisms, clear consent processes, and transparency about user data — to both protect the user and comply with GDPR/HIPAA.
User fatigue and long-term engagement sustainability
Initial excitement around gamified experiences can wear off fast, especially if they’re repetitive or can’t keep up with the user’s dynamics. In chronic condition management, it’s even more difficult to consistently improve patient engagement due to the long and mentally taxing health journey.
Gamification in healthcare should be designed with flexibility in mind. Setbacks, missed days, and low-effort days are a part of reality for many people, and the system should flow with these. Adaptive personalization, such as progress-based content, timing adjustments, and goal realignment, also keeps the experience fresh and patients engaged.
Accessibility and inclusivity issues
In keeping things fun, one shouldn’t forget that not all users can access that fun in an equal way. Users with cognitive, motor, auditory, or visual impairments might face barriers when it comes to common gamification techniques. During the design research phase, the development team has to analyze the needs of all potential users and design accessible gamification with multiple interaction modes, alternative formats, and the option to opt out of gamified experiences.
How to implement gamification in healthcare: best practices
To make the most out of gamified healthcare experiences, consider applying the following best practices:
- Collaborate with clinicians and behavior scientists early. Inform your gamification strategy with clinical insights and behavioral science from the very start to make sure that the type, form, and timing of gamified elements have a gentle but visible impact on the user’s behavior.
- Tie gamified elements to measurable goals. To avoid gamification just for the sake of it, think through how each element supports a specific goal, like medication adherence or activity.
- Balance extrinsic rewards with intrinsic motivation. Combine experiences based on immediate pay-offs with those that reinforce users’ autonomy, competence, and relatedness, as outlined in Self-Determination Theory.
- Repeatedly validate with real users. Give your gamification strategy a crash test early in the design process and later in the development process to iterate on the real-world user feedback, not your guesswork. Make sure to include users with various health conditions (if applicable), abilities, and needs.
- Design for trust as much as for fun. Include an explicit transparency policy that outlines how and why user data is collected, processed, and used. Walk the talk by putting in place robust data security measures that meet the best industry standards.
Because healthcare can come with XP
Despite its seemingly lightweight nature, gamification in healthcare shows a lot of promise for transforming the entire healthcare journey for patients and medical practitioners alike. By incorporating game-like elements into healthcare apps, healthcare providers can improve clinical outcomes, boost disease prevention efforts, and achieve improved physical therapy results.
However, gamified healthcare experiences have to be taken with a bit of salt. What motivates one user might dampen the enthusiasm of others or cause anxiety for some. That’s why it’s important to design a gamified experience with inclusivity and empathy in mind, so that streaks don’t become a source of stress or unhealthy pressure, and virtual rewards won’t outweigh real-world health goals.