IEEE
Conference on Games 2026

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

Submission Instructions

We invite the submission of full *technical* papers with an 8 page limit. Full *technical* papers should provide a technical or empirical contribution to scientific or engineering aspects of games. Relevant dates for this call are as follows:

Submission of full technical papers: 17th March 2026
Notification of acceptance of full technical papers: 1st May 2026
Submission of the camera-ready version of full technical papers: 28th May 2026

All page limits include references and appendices.
NONE OF THE SUBMISSION DEADLINES WILL BE EXTENDED.
All deadlines are Anytime on Earth (AoE).

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.