From prototypes to comparable evidence: A Design–Mechanism–Measurement view of AR gamified rehabilitation

Augmented Reality (AR) gamification shows growing promise as an approach to the design of rehabilitation tools, but evidence on intervention effectiveness remains difficult to synthesise and compare across systems and studies. As part of a broader scoping review, we analyse 21 papers that report on AR gamified rehabilitation and examine how design choices, mechanisms, and measurement practices are connected in those studies. Our analysis reveals a recurring Design – Mechanism – Measurement (D-M-M) misalignment: systems increasingly combine heterogeneous AR delivery and sensing pipelines with gamified feedback, yet intervention mechanisms are rarely specified as testable pathways, and evaluations more often emphasise usability and feasibility of tools than indicators of rehabilitation change. We argue that future work should report AR gamified rehabilitation as an explicit intervention logic and make minimal D-M-M claims linking core design ingredients to hypothesised mechanisms and aligned measures. The next phase of this work will extend the same analytic lens across the wider review corpus to examine whether this pattern is specific to rehabilitation or reflects broader reporting tendencies in AR gamified physical activity research.