Creating awareness of sleep-wake hours by gamification

Abstract

Gamification can be used to motivate people to carry out hard-toperform tasks. It can help in changing undesirable habits and in improving a person’s subjective well-being. Sleep-wake behaviors are important determinants of day-to-day well-being. This study aims to find out whether it is possible to modify sleep-wake habits using gamification. To this end, a gamified alarm clock app, Sleepy Bird, was designed and tested in a user study with thirteen participants using gamified and thirteen participants using non-gamified versions for two weeks. The results indicate that the participants of the gamified version were more motivated to start the day at required times than the participants of the non-gamified version. The participants of the gamified version were also observed to have made desirable modifications to their sleep-wake habits. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016.