ADITHO – A serious game for training and evaluating medical ethics skills

Abstract

This paper presents “A Day In The HOspital”, a Digital Serious Game aiming at providing a technological tool for both evaluating and training ethical skills of medical staff personnel. During the game, the player interprets the role of a physician who has to perform a decision-making process that involves his ethical and medical skills. Usability and sense of Presence have been assessed through a specific post-game Likert-questionnaire. In order to evaluate the potential of the game as a medical training tool, experimental sessions have been conducted with two different groups of participants (“non-medical” and “medical” groups) and game outcomes have been statistically compared. Participants belonging to both the experimental groups report a high level of game Usability and sense of Presence. Finally, the statistically higher game score obtained by the “medical” group demonstrates the usefulness of ADITHO for evaluating and training ethical skills.