From prototypes to comparable evidence: A Design–Mechanism–Measurement view of AR gamified rehabilitation
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Date
2026-06-09
Authors
Shen, Runkun
Linehan, Conor
Mevlevioglu, Deniz
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
Published Version
Abstract
Augmented Reality (AR) gamification shows growing promise as an approach to the design of rehabilitation tools, but evidence on intervention effectiveness remains difficult to synthesise and compare across systems and studies. As part of a broader scoping review, we analyse 21 papers that report on AR gamified rehabilitation and examine how design choices, mechanisms, and measurement practices are connected in those studies. Our analysis reveals a recurring Design – Mechanism – Measurement (D-M-M) misalignment: systems increasingly combine heterogeneous AR delivery and sensing pipelines with gamified feedback, yet intervention mechanisms are rarely specified as testable pathways, and evaluations more often emphasise usability and feasibility of tools than indicators of rehabilitation change. We argue that future work should report AR gamified rehabilitation as an explicit intervention logic and make minimal D-M-M claims linking core design ingredients to hypothesised mechanisms and aligned measures. The next phase of this work will extend the same analytic lens across the wider review corpus to examine whether this pattern is specific to rehabilitation or reflects broader reporting tendencies in AR gamified physical activity research.
Description
© 2026, the owner/author(s). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Keywords
Augmented reality , Design-Mechanism-Measurement , Digital health , Gamification , Rehabilitation , Sensing and tracking , [ComputerScience]
Citation
Shen, R, Linehan, C & Mevlevioglu, D 2026, From prototypes to comparable evidence: A Design–Mechanism–Measurement view of AR gamified rehabilitation. in IMX '26: Proceedings of the 2026 ACM International Conference on Interactive Media Experiences, Athlone, Ireland 9-11 June 2026. IMX 2026 - Proceedings of the 2026 ACM International Conference on Interactive Media Experiences, Association for Computing Machinery , pp. 514-518. https://doi.org/10.1145/3788851.3815034
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