An intelligent serious game for supporting African and African Caribbean men during pre- and post-diagnosis of prostate cancer

Prostate cancer is the most common cancer diagnosed in men in the UK. Over 40, 000 men are diagnosed with prostate cancer every year and one in four Black men will develop prostate cancer at some point in their lives. High mortality rates among African and African Caribbean men exist due to the various barriers which prevent them from seeking advice and early treatment for prostate cancer. Such barriers include unawareness of risk, symptoms, and treatments for prostate cancer, and trust/mistrust of healthcare services. There is a need for understanding and developing culturally sensitive interventions to enhance knowledge and understanding of prostate cancer in African and African Caribbean men, and to encourage presentation as early as possible, as this could save lives. Serious games and computational intelligence can provide a supportive framework for patients at the pre- and post-diagnosis stages. We are proposing an intelligent serious game which can build a model of the patient via their user-profile and in game responses. This data is analysed by a computational intelligence layer, built beneath the game layer, which assesses the risk factors and feeds back to the patient, via the game layer, timely cues for action. This approach can overcome some of the existing barriers to timely presentation and diagnosis for this target population including their preferences in mining health information, previous negative experiences with health professionals and other barriers which prevent men at risk from seeking medical attention. © 2014 IEEE.