Development and evaluation of an emergency department serious game for undergraduate medical students

Serious games are risk-free environments training various medical competencies, such as clinical reasoning, without endangering patients’ safety. Furthermore, serious games provide a context for training situations with unpredictable outcomes. Training these competencies is particularly important for healthcare professionals in emergency medicine.

Based on these considerations, we designed, implemented, and evaluated a serious game in form of an emergency department, containing the features of a virtual patient generator, a chatbot for medical history taking with self-formulated questions, artificially generated faces based on an artificial intelligence algorithm, and feedback for students. The development process was based on an already existing framework resulting in an iterative procedure between development and evaluation. The serious game was evaluated using the System Usability Scale and the User Experience Questionnaire.

The System Usability Scale provided a substantial result for the usability. In terms of the user experience, four scales yielded positive results, whereas two scales yielded neutral results.

The evaluation of both usability and user experience yielded overall positive results, while simultaneously identifying potential areas for improvement. Further studies will address the implementation of additional game design elements, and testing student learning outcome.