The use of gamification on cybersecurity awareness of healthcare professionals

Carreiro, Ana; Silva, Carina; Antunes, Mário

http://hdl.handle.net/10400.21/17615

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Authors

Carreiro, Ana

Silva, Carina

Antunes, Mário

Abstract(s)

Cybersecurity has a major impact on the healthcare sector, mainly due to the sensitive data and vital medical devices that, when an attack occurs, may compromise the patient's life, safety, and well-being. However, those institutions fail to implement correct system protection policies and provide adequate programs for cybersecurity training and raising cybersecurity awareness. Healthcare professionals develop their academic courses focusing on providing the best care for the patients, studying guidelines, treatment protocols, and diagnostic criteria. However, there are insufficient subjects dedicated to the development of digital literacy to match the requisites of the daily challenges of those professionals, with human error being the main cause of data breaches worldwide. So, developing training programs to face the cybersecurity day-to-day threats is mandatory. Broadly speaking, traditional training programs seem to fail to retain students’ motivation, engagement, and long-term knowledge acquisition, being time-consuming and challenging in scheduling and planning. To face this situation, new techniques, such as gamification, have emerged, with promising results on motivation and engagement, allowing the users to be the center of the training programs, matching the strategy to their levels of knowledge and preferences. This paper aims to identify the existing gamified approaches available, review the state-of-the-art related to gamification and cybersecurity training, and elaborate on how they can be successfully applied to training programs for healthcare professionals.

Description

This work is partially financed by national funds through Concurso Interno de Projetos de Investigação, Desenvolvimento, Inovação e Criação Artística (ID&CA) from Polytechnical Institute of Lisbon under the project IPL/2022/HeCyGame_ESTeSL.