It has been hectic months so far. I wrote this article 3 months back and now only had time to publish it. Interestingly I didn't see much change in concepts so its still relevant.
Everyone wants to lead a healthy life, what is stopping them from that, in my point of view its two things i) Their daily busy schedule ii) Lack of awareness. Though point i) is one of the cause, there are persons like Arnold who has proven to world that shouldn't stop them (I heard, he used to do his exercise inside a military tank so he doesn't skip his routine). So, lets conclude busy schedule with lack of motivation.
Before coming to the motivation part lets try to understand one more element which is absentmindedness. Forget, taking a stroll every one hour we even forget to take our medicines on time. So our challenge here is first to make user start practicing wellness activities then making it a regular activity and realisation, such that they don't require any reminders to perform the activity.
How does an App helps achieving all this?
There are some capabilities of mobile device which we can leverage. Lets start with first part, making user to start an activity and be a regular.
I have been writing numerous articles in this blog about push notifications, so lets start with that (Advt;)). Our first step would be an attempt to understand what is users current health state and what he requires. Is it that, they want to reduce weight or as simple as pill reminder. Based on his need our App would create a plan (eg., take a short walk every one hour, drink water every half an hour etc.,) we would remind user to do this with notifications. The catch here is the App must be intelligent enough on when to remind and when not to. For eg., I don't want a reminder to take a short walk when I am inside a train. Also we must not ask user to enter how many steps he walked, the App must automatically do that. As much as possible minimum data entries would be ideal.
Intelligent reminders alone enough?
Seems no. Here is where gamification and social media helps. First lets create a game plan which is more relevant to user's need. As every game has a hero (of-course, users are the hero) and villain. Lets define to users what helps them increase their power to defeat bad guys (As spinach powers Popeye :)). An example would be drinking 8L of water everyday would help you to achieve special powers to cross some levels and in turn if you smoke you would lose some powers. Again this would be based on user's need.
Now game plan is defined, intelligent notifications are build around it. What more is required. A Team. As even if App didn't motivate the users, making sure their team never fails would motivate them more. We are all in social media platforms we can leverage that to form a team.
Our health game plans must be simple, non-lengthy and achievable. We need to make sure our goals shouldn't de-motivate. As and when Team completes a small task it will elevate the team’s status and bring in more challenges. After every game a Performer badge could be provided to a master performer in a team and best team could be awarded as well and rankings in leadership board, which would be viewed by everyone. We need to bring in capabilities where a team member can poke other team member to do his tasks.
We need to define the leaderboard very carefully such that it should be motivating by displaying how many points/position a team is below his next Team so that it might motivate him to do things timely to beat that nearest team rather than showing the team with >100k points alone which would be de-motivating. Awareness can be built inside the game with related videos and articles which would help them to win the game.
Remember we need to also be careful about what we share in social, as not many users would be willing to share their weight loss/any personal health goal to all their friends.
I hope these are the first steps and furthermore would be data mining and targeted notifications, lets discuss about that in next blog.
