A serious game prototype for education of medical doctors and students on insulin management for treatment of diabetes mellitus

Abstract

This paper describes the construction of a serious game prototype for training doctors and medical students about insulin management for the treatment of diabetes mellitus (DM). There are a few simulators that are educationally useful for this aim, but they are little attractive for the user, so we intend to create a tool that includes game elements to make it more fun and appealing. A series of hypothetical, clinical cases with increasing complexity are used to develop a minimum curriculum for training, incorporating all the principal aspects of insulin therapy for DM in the context of primary health care. We chose to develop an Adventure game, based on a minimum curriculum of contents about insulin management. The game presents a series of clinical scenarios and asks the players to make decisions about the best diagnostic and therapeutic options for each case. After each decision, the players receive feedback, comparing their decisions with the recommendations from the best-quality medical literature, and have access to additional educational resources (texts, algorithms, links to guidelines).