LINA - A Social Augmented Reality Game around Mental Health, Supporting Real-world Connection and Sense of Belonging for Early Adolescents

Early adolescence is a time of major social change; strong sense belonging and peer connectedness an essential protective factor in mental health during that period. In this paper we introduce LINA, augmented reality (AR) smartphone-based serious game played school by entire class (age 10+) together with their teacher, which aims to facilitate improve interaction, climate, while creating safe space reflect on external stressors related family circumstance. LINA was developed through interdisciplinary collaboration involving playwright, software developers, psychologists, artists, via iterative co-development process young people. A prototype has been evaluated quantitatively for usability qualitatively efficacy study 91 early adolescents (agemean=11.41). Results from the Game User Experience Satisfaction Scale (GUESS-18) data qualitative focus groups showed high acceptability preliminary game. Using AR, shared immersive narrative collaborative gameplay physical offers opportunity harness adolescent affinity digital technology towards improving real-world connection belonging.