Developing a Gamification-Based mHealth Platform to Support Orofacial Myofunctional Therapy for Children

Orofacial myofunctional disorders in children are a common problem with most therapy consisting of interventions to be done at home. Parents often find it difficult to motivate their children to exercise, and it is impossible for speech therapists to effectively track how much the children have practiced at home. Gamified mHealth applications have already been successfully applied in other domains of speech therapy, such as speech apraxia and aphasia. For orofacial myofunctional therapy, a sophisticated and well-established solution is still lacking. We describe the requirements and development of LudusMyo, an mHealth application to support OMD therapy specifically. We expect that such a gamified mHealth application will significantly increase the children's motivation to continue their therapy at home while enabling therapists to reliably track their patients' progress and tailor the outpatient therapy accordingly.