Abstract
Unpaid blood donation is a selfless act of citizenship and the usage of gamification elements in blood donation apps can enhance the donors’ experience, especially among youth. This paper analyses the functionalities and explores gamification elements of the existing blood donation apps in the mobile market. A search in Google Play, Apple Apps store, Blackberry App World, and Windows Mobile App store was performed to select 10 gamified BD apps with three duplicates out of 801 pinpointed. The results show that the majority of the blood donation apps selected do not support multiple languages and that the predominant authentication methods are traditional and social logins. Moreover, all the apps were intended for more than one purpose among helping users to find donors and blood centres, track their records and check their eligibility to donate. Most apps installed include notification features and built-in geolocation services to instantly inform the users of donation need in nearby locations. Badges and redeemable points were the most recurrent gamification elements in the blood donation apps selected. There is a need for better incentives in order to not only retain the potential donors but also to recruit non-willing ones.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Sarkar, S.: Artificial blood. Indian J. Crit. Care Med. 12(3), 140–144 (2008)
Williamson, L.M., Devine, D.V.: Challenges in the management of the blood supply. Lancet 381(9880), 1866–1875 (2013)
Who.int. WHO: More voluntary blood donors needed (2013). https://goo.gl/GCXAHl. Accessed 1 Sept 2016
Euro.who.int. Blood safety, Data and statistics (2011). https://goo.gl/Z7dHyB. Accessed 1 Sept 2016
Williams, M.S.: Gamification in Blood donation (2012). https://goo.gl/m2iwjo. Accessed 2 Sept 2016
Reich, P., Roberts, P., Laabs, N., Chinn, A., McEvoy, P., Hirschler, N., Murphy, E.L.: A randomized trial of blood donor recruitment strategies. Transfusion 46, 1090–1096 (2006)
Setiawan, M.A., Putra, H.H.: Bloodhub: a context aware system to increase voluntary blood donors’ participation. In: International Conference on Science and Technology, pp. 231–235. IEEE, RMUTT (2015)
Foth, M., Satchell, C., Seeburger, J., Russel-Bennett, R.: Social and mobile interaction design to increase the loyalty rates of young blood donors. In: Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Communities and Technologies, pp. 64–73. ACM, New York (2013)
Smith, A.: Smartphone Ownership–2013 Update, vol. 12. Pew Research Center, Washington DC (2013)
Deterding, S., Dixon, D., Khaled, R., Nacke, L.: From game design elements to gamefulness: defining gamification. In: Proceedings of the 15th International Academic MindTrek Conference: Envisioning Future Media Environments, pp. 9–15. ACM, Tampere (2011)
Huotari, K., Hamari, J.: Defining gamification: a service marketing perspective. In: Proceeding of the 16th International Academic MindTrek Conference, pp. 17–22. ACM, New York (2012)
Fotopoulos, I., Palaiologou, R., Kouris, I., Koutsouris, D.: Cloud-based information system for blood donation. In: Kyriacou, E., Christofides, S., Pattichis, C.S. (eds.) Proceedings of the 14th Mediterranean Conference on Medical and Biological Engineering and Computing, pp. 802–807. Springer, Paphos (2016)
Eklund, R.C., Tenenbaum, G.: Encyclopedia of Sport and Exercise Psychology. SAGE Publications, Thousand Oaks (2014)
Liberati, A., Altman, D.G., Tetzlaff, J., Mulrow, C., Gøtzsche, P.C., Ioannidis, J.P., Clarke, M., Devereaux, P., Kleijnen, J., Moher, D.: The PRISMA statement for reporting systematic reviews and meta-analyses of studies that evaluate health care interventions: explanation and elaboration. Ann. Intern. Med. 151(4), 65–94 (2009)
Ouhbi, S., Fernández-Alemán, J.L., Toval, A., Idri, A., Pozo, J.R.: Free blood donation mobile application. J. Med. Syst. 39(5), 1–20 (2015)
Stone, P.W.: Popping the (PICO) question in research and evidence-based practice. Appl. Nurs. Res. 15(3), 197–198 (2002)
Ouhbi, S., Fernández-Alemán, J.L., Pozo, J.R., El Bajta, M., Toval, A., Idri, A.: Compliance of blood donation apps with mobile OS usability guidelines. J. Med. Syst. 39(6), 63:1–63:21 (2015)
Bachiri, M., Idri, A., Fernandez-Aleman, J.L., Toval, A.: Mobile personal health records for pregnancy monitoring functionalities: analysis and potential. J. Comput. Methods Programs Biomed. 134, 121–135 (2016)
Statistica. US mobile smartphone OS market share 2012–2016 (2016). https://goo.gl/zOV5lw. Accessed 10 Aug 2016
Martínez, M.: Contingency planning for natural disasters. Int. Soc. Blood Transfus. Sci. Ser. 6(1), 212–215 (2011)
Who.int. Blood Donor Selection: Guidelines on Assessing Donor Suitability for Blood Donation. World Health Organization (2012). https://goo.gl/0PpBhG. Accessed 4 Sept 2016
McMillan, J.E.R., Glisson, W.B., Bromby, M.: Investigating the increase in mobile phone evidence in criminal activities. In: 46th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, HICSS, pp. 4900–4909. IEEE, Hawaii (2013)
Pennycook, A.: The cultural politics of English as an international language. Teach. Talk. Teach. III(3), 21–23 (1995)
James, A.B., Josephson, C.D., Shaz, B.H., Schreiber, G.B.,Hillyer, C.D., Roback, J.D.: The value of area-based analyses of donation patterns for recruitment strategies. Transfusion, 54(12), 3015–3060 (2014, in press)
Lemmens, K.P.H., Abraham, C., Ruiter, R.A.C., Veldhuizen, I.J.T., Bos, A.E.R., Schaalma, H.P.: Identifying blood donors willing to help with recruitment. Vox Sang. 95, 211–217 (2008)
Smith, A., Matthews, R., Fiddler, J.: Recruitment and retention of blood donors in four Canadian cities: an analysis of the role of community and social networks. Transfusion 53, 180S–184S (2013)
Boulos, M.N.K., Yang, S.P.: Exergames for health and fitness: the roles of GPS and geosocial apps. Int. J. Health Geogr. 12(1), 18 (2013)
Redcross.org. Red Cross launches RapidPass Online Health History System (2015). https://goo.gl/PyyUVQ. Accessed 3 Oct 2016
Centralbloodbank.org. DonorPass (2014). https://goo.gl/1lljtk. Accessed 3 Oct 2016
Deterding, S.: Situated motivational affordances of game elements: a conceptual model. In: A Workshop at CHI. ACM, Vancouver (2011)
Sundarde, C., Jain, S., Shraikh, E.: Advancement of blood donation application (2015). https://goo.gl/Fae1pR. Accessed 20 Oct 2016
Ibrar, M., Khan, O.: The impact of reward of employee performance (a case study of Malakand Private School). Int. Lett. Soc. Humanist. Sci. 52, 95–103 (2015)
Rimon, G.: It’s not about cash: research-based facts on employee engagement (2015). https://goo.gl/cAxut2. Accessed 5 Oct 2016
Acknowledgments
This work was conducted within the research project MPHR-PPR1-2015-2018. The authors would like to thank the Moroccan MESRSFC and CNRST for their support.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 Springer International Publishing AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Sardi, L., Idri, A., Fernández-Alemán, J.L. (2017). Gamified Mobile Blood Donation Applications. In: Rojas, I., Ortuño, F. (eds) Bioinformatics and Biomedical Engineering. IWBBIO 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10208. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-56148-6_14
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-56148-6_14
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-56147-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-56148-6
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)