IEEE CoG 2026

Call for Papers - Special Session

Games for Health and Wellbeing

Organizing committee

Paris Mavromoustakos-Blom, Tilburg University, The Netherlands (p.blom@tilburguniversity.edu)
Rafael Bidarra, TU Delft, The Netherlands (r.bidarra@tudelft.nl)
Mehmet Kosa, Marshall University, USA
Thomas Nikodelis, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece
Pieter Spronck, Tilburg University, The Netherlands

Scope

Games have traditionally been used as a medium to assess, maintain, or even improve human’s health and living standards. This concerns various aspects of health and wellbeing, such as physical health, mental health, cognitive capacity, and accessibility. The rapid improvement of (mostly video) game technology, alongside advances in Artificial Intelligence and sensor technology, has created a fertile field for research and development of human-centered games within these domains. From the gamification of routine medical tests, to the real-time personalization of at-home gamified therapy sessions, both game and health studies have benefitted from each other’s progress. Ultimately, games can be employed as a medium for both measuring and monitoring human behavior, as well as a means towards human improvement and facilitation of overall wellbeing.

This special session addresses various questions around games and immersive environments focused on health and wellbeing, including the following:

To what extent can games supplement, or even replace, traditional therapeutic sessions?
How can we design games that adapt to match the capabilities of each individual player?
Are there new methods emerging from health sciences that are especially suited for a game application?
Are there new game technologies that can be purposefully applied to solve health challenges?

Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

Games for physical health and motor learning
Games for mental health
Games for people with disabilities
Games for human improvement
Games for health education and training
Alternative game controllers based on players’ capabilities

Program Committee members

Pieter Spronck, Tilburg University, Netherlands
Mehmet Kosa, Marshall University, USA
Thomas Nikodelis, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece
Kyana van Eijndhoven, Tilburg University, Netherlands
Kamyab Ghorbanpour, Tilburg University, Netherlands
Julija Vaitonyte, Tilburg University, Netherlands
Vasileios Mylonas, University of Nebraska at Omaha, USA
Fred Atilla. Tilburg University, Netherlands
Paula Magalhães, University of Minho, Portugal
Gloria Mittmann, Karl Landsteiner University, Austria
Barbara Göbl, University of Vienna, Austria

Submission Instructions

This is a call for auxiliary papers. We invite the submission of short, competition and vision papers:

Short papers (4 pages page limit) describe work in progress, smaller projects that are not yet ready to be published as a full paper, or new progress on projects that have been reported elsewhere.
Competition papers (8 pages page limit) describe research related to one of the competitions in the Games community, including the design of new competitions and in particular submissions to existing competitions.
Vision papers (8 pages page limit) describe a vision for the future of the Games field or some part of it, be based on extensive research, and include a comprehensive bibliography. Please notice that the standards for vision papers are high: literature reviews and opinion papers with speculations not grounded in research are immediately rejected.

All page limits include references and appendices.
All accepted auxiliary papers will be included in the proceedings of the conference.
NONE OF THE SUBMISSION DEADLINES WILL BE EXTENDED.
All deadlines are Anytime on Earth (AoE).

Relevant dates for this call are as follows:

Submission of auxiliary papers: 14th May 2026
Notification of acceptance of auxiliary papers: 10th June 2026
Submission of the camera-ready version of auxiliary papers: 24th June 2006
Conference dates: 1st – 4th September 2026

Papers must be submitted through the conference submission system available at the following link: https://easychair.org/conferences?conf=ieeecog2026

All paper submissions should follow the recommended IEEE conference author guidelines. MS Word and LaTeX templates can be found at https://www.ieee.org/conferences/publishing/templates

All submitted papers will be fully peer-reviewed, and accepted papers will be published in the conference proceedings and on IEEE Xplore. CoG will use a *double-anonymous review process*. Authors must omit their names and affiliations from their submissions, avoiding obvious identifying statements. Submissions not abiding by anonymity requirements will be desk rejected.

Papers might be allocated to either poster presentations or oral presentations.