Game on for Health: A Bibliometric Study of Digital Health and Gamification (2005–2025)

With the increasing integration of computational and information science in healthcare, the digital health field has leveraged gamification as a strategy to enhance user engagement and behavior change. However, existing studies still lack a comprehensive mapping of digital health gamification. This study presents a bibliometric analysis of 1,967 Scopus-indexed publications on digital health gamification from 2005 to 2025, 618 core documents were analyzed using BiblioMagika ® , Biblioshiny, VOSviewer, and OpenRefine. The dataset includes 3,240 contributing authors, with journal articles (50.65%) and conference papers (37.54%) dominating the field. English-language publications account for 98.71%. A rapid rise in publications post-2016 reflects the field’s growing interest. Interdisciplinary collaboration is evident, with contributions from medicine (58.9%), computer science (43.9%), and engineering (29.3%). The United States leads with 144 publications (h-index 27, 2,435 citations), followed by the UK (50 publications, h-index 15) and Australia (47 publications, h-index 16). The University of Twente ranks first among the top 20 institutions. Four prolific authors are based in Australia. Co-occurrence analysis of 1,763 author keywords identified seven major clusters, including behavior change, mental health, chronic disease, mobile health apps, and AI-driven personalization. Topic modeling revealed three dominant themes, and the most prominent theme was digital health gamification applications. This study highlights gamification’s role in shaping health behaviors and the need for refined models to address sustainability and gamification fatigue. It also underscores the increasing use of adaptive, AI-driven personalization in digital health, emphasizing ethical governance and inclusive design.