Gamifying App-Based Low-Intensity Psychological Interventions to Prevent Sports Injuries in Young Athletes: A Review and Some Guidelines

Sports injuries have become a real health concern. Particularly noticeable is the increasing number of severe sports injuries among young people. Sports injury (SI) is a multifactorial event where many internal and external, proximal and remote factors play a role in a recursive way, including physi...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:International journal of environmental research and public health 2021-12, Vol.18 (24), p.12997
Main Authors: Rubio, Víctor J, Olmedilla, Aurelio
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adolescent
Athletes
Athletic Injuries - prevention & control
Educational objectives
Epidemiology
Gamification
Guidelines
Humans
Injury prevention
Intervention
Mobile Applications
Motivation
Professionals
Psychosocial Intervention
Review
Self help
Skills
Soccer
Sports
Sports injuries
Sports related injuries
Young adults
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Sports injuries have become a real health concern. Particularly noticeable is the increasing number of severe sports injuries among young people. Sports injury (SI) is a multifactorial event where many internal and external, proximal and remote factors play a role in a recursive way, including physical and psychological variables. Accordingly, many voices expressing the need of tackling that and several prevention programs have arisen. Nevertheless, different barriers and limitations prevent a wide extension of well-controlled programs, closely monitored by highly specialized professionals in ordinary sports grass-root organizations. These have helped flourishing different low intensity (LI)-interventions and e-Health apps focusing on both physical warmup, training and fitness, and mental skills aimed at reducing athlete's vulnerability to SIs. This kind of intervention usually uses self-administered techniques and/or non-specialized staff that can effectively monitoring the program. In fact, LI-interventions have shown to be effective coping with different health and psychological issues. However, these interventions face an important challenge: the lack of engagement people usually show. The current paper proposes how gamification can contribute to the engagement to such interventions. Based on the mechanics-dynamics-aesthetics framework to analyze game design, the paper suggests a set of guidelines app- and web-LI interventions aimed at preventing SIs should include to foster motivation and reduce attrition.
ISSN:1660-4601
1661-7827
1660-4601
DOI:10.3390/ijerph182412997