Chris York is a psychologist with a special job. He sells his services to health technology entrepreneurs and software developers who
100Plus Founder Chris Hogg (left) and Psychologist Chris York are trying to unlock a mystery: How to create a killer gaming app for health? To motivate individuals to exercise and eat healthy, wellness companies such as Keas, Virgin HealthMiles, and Limeade dangle badges and points as rewards. Much like say, cocaine, winning that badge—or even the thought of it, releases in the brain higher levels of the neurotransmitter dopamine that is associated with pleasure.
But depending on how they’re used, those rewards can be meaningless, and motivation eventually fades. York and his clients are working hard to find ways to keep users engaged, and ultimately modify their behavior. “People have the attitude that they’ll win a few points and call it a day. In the long term, you have to build a product that people will use for a long time,” says York. “We want to get at the root cause of what motivates people,” says Chris Hogg, co-founder of 100Plus, a start-up that uses predictive modeling to coax people into tweaking their behavior. “I think we’re missing a step, an awareness of understanding at a deeper level—from knowing I’m overweight to the impact of change.”
Hogg is collaborating with York to solve that riddle. Last month, at SXSW 100Plus showed off a mini mobile web app. Crunching data from the Centers for Disease Control, it crafted a story around drinking: When and why it can help you live longer, and when it might kill you. More than 7,000 people entered their alcohol consumption at the conference, including their age, gender, and weight. They got an answer on how many days they’ve shaved off their lifespan, and some suggestions on what to do to burn off the calories (40 minutes of bicycle polo was one). It was informative in a fun way.
Next month, at Health 2.0 in Boston, 100Plus will unveil another experimental app, where users will be assigned small healthy missions in the form of a scavenger hunt with varying levels of difficulty. This fall, it will launch its beta app.
Hogg quit his job last October at biotech company Gilead Sciences to form 100Plus with Ryan Howard, founder and CEO of Practice Fusion, an electronic health record company. At Gilead, he drilled data for the cardiovascular and Type 2 diabetes markets to figure out why doctors make certain treatment decisions, and forecast changes in those markets. In his conversations with patients, he was struck by how little they knew about their health. “I thought, ‘what if I figure out a way to [use data] in a consumer friendly way,’” says Hogg.
For Howard, he drew a tale of two Ryans. It showed Howard, who weighed 265 pounds at 20, on a catastrophic trajectory as he aged and died by 75, saddled with diabetes and heart problems. Fortunately, the 36-year-old Howard is now fit at 190 pounds, and his prognosis is much brighter. He’s more likely to die at 80, with fewer ailments. To construct his predictive algorithm, Hogg tapped into Practice Fusion’s database of 34 million patients, and used de-identified information to pool patients with similar characteristics, and show Howard how he stacked up. “We can tell someone a really interesting story about themselves; it’s not just dry data,” says Hogg, who believes that the trick is to encourage people to make small changes in their behavior, with the positive effects compounding over time.
York, who graduated from Stanford University in 2009 with a B.A. in psychology, already knew from working at Keas that just throwing data at people, such as cholesterol and blood sugar levels, or body mass index to tell them they’re obese, didn’t work. “It’s like the nagging mother-in-law effect,” he says. After a while people tuned out, and less than 2% returned to the site. York was instrumental in successfully revamping Keas’ strategy from being data-focused to being fun and social. Small teams now compete against each other in healthy activities and receive badges as rewards; participation has increased as a result.
Here are five of York’s do’s and don’ts:
1- Don’t reward a goal such as weight loss, instead reward healthy behavior in small increments.
2- Don’t set big goals; keep people engaged by focusing on their health.
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