Emotion regulation (ER) is a key competency in early childhood development, particularly between ages 3 and 5. While serious games (SGs) have proven effective in several educational contexts, few are designed for preschoolers' emotional needs. This study presents Ilhas das Emoções, a digital interactive SG developed in Unity to promote ER in preschool children. The game was co-designed with 5 psychologists. The SG presents psychoeducation on five core emotions (joy, sadness, anger, fear, and disgust). It offers playful, scenario-based learning across three stages: identifying emotions, understanding their emotional causes and consequences, and regulating emotions. This work details the theoretical rationale and technical development of the game, contributing a novel, developmentally appropriate tool to early childhood emotional education.

This study focuses on designing and developing a serious games (SG) platform for the cognitive and psychosocial rehabilitation following an acquired brain injury (ABI). The CogniSpace platform includes both multiplayer cooperative games designed to foster social skills and relationships, as well as single-player games that allow users to make individual progress. A co-design methodology was employed throughout the design and development process, with active involvement from patients with dementia, healthcare professionals, and family members. This approach has resulted in a user-friendly platform which aims to improve memory, executive function, language skills and mathematical reasoning through four SGs: Memory Tornado, Perfect Pair, Counting Change and Everything Ready. Future work will involve conducting a usability study with people with ABI. This research highlights the importance of co-design in the development of SGs for healthcare and demonstrates how involving end users ensures the creation of tools that meet their specific needs.

Adolescence is a crucial period for emotional development, often marked by challenges in emotion regulation (ER) that can contribute to mental health problems such as anxiety, depression and engagement in risky behaviors. Despite increasing independence during this period, parents remain crucial in shaping adolescents' emotional competencies. Recognizing this, the multiplayer serious game Emotion Odyssey was designed to teach and train young adolescents (aged 10-14) and their parents in ER strategies. Using the engaging concept of an escape room, Emotion Odyssey introduces the six basic emotions and ER strategies through immersive scenarios. The development process was participating involving an adolescent, her mother and psychologists ($n=4$). Through interactive gameplay, the game aims to increase emotional understanding and ER skills and encourage adolescents and their parents to communicate openly about emotions.

Acquired brain injury (ABI) is a condition that causes damage to brain tissues and consequently leads to physical, behavioral and cognitive issues. One of the impairments observed after the injury is in the realm of social cognition (SC). This impairment leads these patients to lose their ability to interact socially in a positive and effective manner. Consequently, these patients may socially isolate themselves and lose interpersonal relationships. One of the methods used for cognitive rehabilitation that has proven to be effective is the use of serious games (SG). SG are video games with the purpose of learning and improving people’s live. Thus, in this work, a set of SG will be developed for the cognitive and psychosocial rehabilitation of people with ABI, focusing on socio-emotional skills training. To ensure their success, a co-design methodology will be carried out during the conception and implementation of the game. This approach will involve patients, healthcare professionals, and caregivers to obtain suggestions and feedback to ensure that the most suitable solutions are implemented in the game. At the end of this work, we hope to have developed a method for training socio-emotional skills that can motivate patients more effectively than traditional methods.

This paper introduces an ongoing project focused on co-designing a serious game (SG) to explore emotion regulation (ER) strategies with parents. The game’s main goal is for parents to learn to regulate their emotions, enabling them to support their adolescents’ emotional development. Semi-structured interviews were conducted to pinpoint the SG’s key motivating and learning features. The participants include four healthcare professionals with an average of 14.75 years of experience. The insights from these interviews show promising concepts that were integrated into the SG. The innovative nature of this project is highlighted by the fact that, to our knowledge, this will be the first SG focusing on training ER skills in parents.

Serious games (SGs) have emerged as an appropriate intervention for adolescents due to their significant use of video games. Although literature reviews and meta-analyses increasingly support the effectiveness and acceptability of SGs in addressing mental health problems and promoting healthy lifestyles in young people, there remains a significant gap in SGs specifically designed to improve emotion regulation (ER) skills. In response, we present the serious game GamEmotion, a 3D digital action-adventure game developed in Unity, designed to provide psychoeducation about six basic emotions (happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise, and disgust) and two ER strategies (cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression). We believe that we have developed the first SG to improve emotional awareness and ER in Portuguese adolescents, based on the Gross process model, one of the most widely reported models of ER. We present the GamEmotion framework alongside our ongoing usability study protocol with young adolescents ($10-14$ years) and their parents. By proposing this innovative tool, we aim to broaden the application of SG and address specific challenges in adolescent ER to improve mental health.

Abstract Knowledge Engineering has become essential in the fields of Medical and Health Care with emphasis for helping citizens to improve their health and quality of life. This includes individual methods and techniques in health‐related knowledge acquisition and representation and their application in the construction of intelligent systems capable of using the acquired information to improve the patients' health and/or quality of life. Haemato‐oncological diseases can provide significant disability and suffering, with severe symptoms and psychological distress. They can create difficulties in fulfilling professional, family and social roles, affecting an individual's quality of life. Health related quality of life (HRQoL) is a subjective concept but there is also an objective component related to physiological indicators. Some of these physiological indicators can be easily assessed by wearable technology such heart rate variability (HRV). This paper introduces an intelligent system to assess, in real‐time, potential HRV indices, that can predict HRQoL in lymphoma patients throughout chemotherapy treatment and to account the individuals' variability. The system is based on wearable technology and intelligent processing of the patients' biometric information to assess some quality of life related parameters. A longitudinal study was conducted among 16 lymphoma patients using this intelligent system. Mixed‐effect regression models were performed to investigate predictors for and time effects on HRQoL. There were no significant changes in all HRQoL domains over time. Some quality of life domains revealed similar time trends as HRV indices. These HRV indices also have a significant effect on the domains of quality of life.