Resilience interventions using interactive technology: a scoping review

This scoping review summarises the literature on resilience interventions that use interactive technology. Resilience refers to a person's mental ability to adaptively deal with challenging situations and is a key skill for dealing with challenges in life. Types of interactive technology used in resilience interventions included serious video games, virtual reality simulations, social robots and commercial off-the-shelf video games. Searching a range of multidisciplinary databases, this review identified 27 publications that evaluated 17 unique interventions. Peer-reviewed papers and conference proceedings published in English and released after 2000 were included in the review. This scoping review finds that interactive technology can be used as an effective intervention to increase resilience. The review identified two types of resilience intervention: stress inoculation and therapeutic treatment. The interventions were analysed using the eight dimensions identified in the gameful experience questionnaire. Providing players with challenging experiences and guiding behaviour while providing feedback were the two most used dimensions. Social experience was underutilised and competition was not used, except in commercial off-the-shelf video games. This review has shown that interactive technologies can deliver effective resilience interventions in an accessible, cost-effective and flexible manner.