Order Up!: Mobile Game To Promote Healthier Food Choices

Faculty: 
Scott Robertson, Rob Solomon
Students: 
Amelia Lambeth

OrderUp! takes health-related gaming in a new direction and seeks to educate players about how to make healthy eating choices in situations nearly everyone encounters regularly in their lives. By casting players as virtual restaurant servers, OrderUp! forces players to make healthy-and fast-menu decisions for a group of demanding, impatient customers. OrderUp! was originally developed as a simple, casual game on Nokia N95 mobile phones. We are building on research findings from testing this first version of the game to develop a new version with higher fidelity graphics and more sophisticated gameplay. This new version will run on modern, Android smartphones and will incorporate features intended to promote cognitive flow, an increased level of engagement and fun with the game, such as progressive increases in gameplay difficulty and better performance and scoring feedback. The revised OrderUp! game will be tested with a population of largely African Americans who are being treated for mental health issues. As such, OrderUp! is designed with contextually relevant motifs and with relevant data and personas.

Lab: 
Director: 
Maribeth Gandy

We are a team of interactive media experts that includes computer scientists, electrical engineers, and graphic artists. IMTC is a multimedia research center at the The Georgia Institute of Technology. IMTC has grown and adapted to meet the needs of business and industry in the USA and abroad by developing and using multimedia technology for enhancement of their core business. IMTC's mission is to assist companies in developing advanced multimedia systems while educating students in multimedia technologies and techniques.

The center also works closely with faculty in a number of other units at Georgia Tech and with numerous other organizations that share and support multimedia technology. For example, IMTC collaborates with The Georgia Center for Advanced Telecommunications Technology, a joint research effort that includes Georgia Tech, Emory University, the Medical College of Georgia, Georgia State University, and The University of Georgia.

http://www.imtc.gatech.edu