About 2 weeks ago I was on a panel at the Games For Health conference in Boston. It was a well attended event and really exciting to see so many people concerned about getting people healthy and active through the use of video games. That really is the perfect storm for me since I am an avid gamer and gym rat. Our panel was on gamification specifically and it was great to hear that other panelist talk about their specific implementations. The people over at Hopelab are really doing some innovative work in this area and it will be great to watch them as they launch the product shortly.
One of the things I did notice was that the conference was overly academic. There tends to be too much focus put on gathering and analyzing data over long periods of time to make decisions. I suppose that’s a necessity when your primary funding is grants and not needing to create a revenue generating product. I also might be a little biased as I have only worked at dotcom’s, so the idea of not moving rapidly and constantly iterating scares me. For there to be any significant changes in the way that health and video games take over the world people just need to jump in. Take the old Nike saying, Just Do It! We can talk and talk and analyze and analyze, but the only thing that is going to happen is…NOTHING!
That was about the only downside to the event. Other than that Boston was great! I had my lobster roll, so all is right in the world.
Tags: g4h, games for health, gamification, gfh
One key part of a successful gamification implementation is tying in the social graph of a user. The social graph being their online social extension of themselves, i.e. FaceBook friends, twitter followers, etc. If you don’t have the graph, you won’t be successful. Gamification allows the rewarding of user actions and what is the point if you aren’t able to share/talk about those rewards?
There is a direct relationship to a support network in regards to wellness as well. Similar to gamification…a wellness plan isn’t successful without the support of your social graph. Sure people can “do it for their own good” or “do it because their doctor told them to”, but really internal drive will only get you so far. The support of your social graph is crucial to sticking to a plan and making a meaningful impact on your wellness plan.
Marrying the idea of a social support network into a gamified wellness plan is the next evolution on the gamification of wellness/fitness. You need to have that social support network to help you along. The online support is only half of the equation as, believe it or not, there is still a real world that dominates our lives. If I share with my friend my most recent goal at the gym, they can “like” my post on FaceBook, but at the same time when I bump into them at a local restaurant we can talk about the progress to my goal. This connection and support keeps me striving to do better. Taking that a step further, if part of the gamified wellness plan was to invite my friends, than not only do I have a support network of my own, I also become part of a support network.
Goals in wellness/fitness will only be attained by adding in the support of an individual’s social graph.
Healthy Shake Challenge
I am taking this experiment to heart and running my own test over the next couple of weeks. My friend has recently started working out in preparation for a vacation (of course). Part of any successful workout regiment is diet. I have thrown out the challenge of replacing lunch with healthy smoothies from a local health shake place as well as having him go to 6 meals instead of 3. This will result in a 500-600 calorie meal instead of the normal 800-1000 calorie meals we scrounge around for from the local burger joint or taco truck.
I basically want to see if by me supporting him and essentially changing my lunch as well what effect that will have in the short term, but also longer term. I plan to only do the “diet” for 2 weeks, but he is on a 12 week plan, so will my initial 2 week social support kick-start that 12 week plan? I know this isn’t scientific and there are a ton of contributing factors that alter his decisions, but nonetheless I think it will be at least interesting to note any changes.
So I’ve been sick for about 4 days now, which means I haven’t gone to the gym in 4 days…grrr!
The illness itself doesn’t really bug me it’s just that I get antsy and want to get back in to workout, I feel like I am just getting fatter by not doing anything. On the other hand, it’s also good to take off 1 week every so often to give your body a rest. Given how much I work out, it’s probably good for my joints, but man I get stir crazy.
That being said, it was interesting to see the difference in my calories burned this week vs a normal week for me:
Past 4 days = avg. 2400 calories burned
Normal 4 days = avg. 2800 calories burned
Even on my rest day, I still burned about 200 calories more than the last couple of days. I find data like this fascinating as it really shows that my resting metabolic does do stuff even on my days off during an active week and 400 calories per day less over 1 week is 2800 calories less or around 80% of a pound.
This post has nothing to do with gamification suggestions for BodyBugg, but instead just insight into what the data can show you if you take the time to look at it.
Although, on a side note for gamification, my local 24Hour Fitness just added location specific FB pages, so I am hoping they start doing local challenges. Check-in leaderboard please!
Tags: bodybugg, calories burned, metabolic rate
First off…she was great…very motivating and very informative. 
The sad thing from my perspective, which is looking into the engagement aspects of the program is that they take a “sink or swim” approach and really put everything on the individual user. I personally don’t need any more motivation so for me it’s not a big deal, but for a $200 product with a recurring monthly charge you would think bodymedia would invest in the long-term engagement of a client. With gamification they could easily extend the lifetime value of each client, but I’ll talk about that later.
When I asked the coach how they keep people motivated, she said, “It’s all up to them”. Everything is based on people having their own motivation, but last time I checked the couch potato who is looking to lose weight has a hard enough time pulling their ass off the couch to begin with. The approach, if looked at cynically, is that Bodybugg already made their $250, so really could care less about the individual client being fully engaged.
The interface itself, specific to bodybugg, is HORRIBLE. Things are slow and it takes a coaching session to even learn about the different offerings that are even available. All of this could be shown through a well thought out gamification on boarding strategy which holds the user’s hand from day one. I guess at that point the “coaches” would be out of a job 
When we talked about the difficulty of food tracking, she simply said, “People are lazy” and “that’s why it’s difficult”. To some extent I agree with her, but at the same time she talked me through a special way to search the database for specific food. I came from online search advertising and would never have searched the way they recommend. It frankly sounded like some internal way they setup their search algorithm and blame peoples lack of liking it as laziness as opposed to poor design.
All in all, she was great and very helpful, but pointed out a few improvements that could be made via gamification for more engagement.
Gamification tips:
- Add in goals for calorie deficit – Everything is based on weight loss (which is weird, but she specifically said they factor in body composition goals). There should be goals and achievements from hitting your calorie deficit daily, weekly, monthly, etc.
- Give achievements for entering in food – It’s a pain, so give a people even more of a reason to want to do this. Maybe even tie in a reward of a free shake at the gym for doing it X times in a row. This accomplishes more engagement, but also gives exposure to other parts of the business as well as other revenue streams (i.e. go in for your free shake and end up buying supplements too)
- Have short-term and long-term goals based on the assessment test and current track a user is on – This is currently done, but just not well, so it might just be a presentation layer thing in which they really need to show it off more. I have no sense of progression in my goals…there is no carrot.
- Social – They have a generic tie into the social graph, but no real call to action to want to use it. It’s just kinda off to the side. Tie this into braggable moments related to the achievements I listed above. If I just hit 5 days in a row of entering my food and got a badge/trophy…that’s when I want to brag about it, so let me use FaceBook/Twitter right then. With it living off to the side it’s really just wasting real estate on the site.
I still cannot figure out how people stay motivated to use this thing and the device is still in the “pretty neat” category, but at this point I am looking forward to ebay’ing it in 5 months. This could be that I am not in the target market, but really they could easily expand the market and engage a larger audience with just a few tweaks like I suggest above.
Tags: achievement, badges, bodybugg, food tracking, phone coach, trophies
OK, this week has been interesting in that it really is a pain to get the BodybuggSP setup. Entering in all of the food is just time consuming, but I have started to notice that I eat basically the same thing everyday. Once you have setup a particular food in your meal the system is smart enough to bring it up again, so repeated meals end up being just a few clicks.
Another gripe I have is that we cook a lot, so it’s really hard to gauge how to track that. I then end up playing the guessing game and who knows if I am remotely accurate on the calorie consumption.
So far this thing has given me great insight into how many calories I burn, which is a huge plus for me, but calories consumed is still something that needs some work. If I am too lazy to do it, somebody who really needs improved fitness will not do it.
Gamification Suggestions:
The onboarding process needs to have more hand-holding. I like that there is a coaching session offered up, but there really needs to be the online equivalent available as well. There is no directed engagement with the site…it’s a lot of just me bouncing around and figuring things out. If they were to add a gamification layer that helps onboard new clients than I think they would see a bump in the long term engagement of users. Apex should recognize the fact that it’s painful to use their product and if they invested in the long-term engagement of the user through a game layer they could lower the cost barrier to entry as well as the monthly’s. This would go a long way in engaging more users because right now this product is very cost prohibitive. You can’t have long term success with expensive hardware and a painful online experience…something has to give.
The verdict is still out on if this device is changing my behavior…
Tags: bodybugg, calories consumed, diet, diet tracking, food logging
So I just added Sunday’s to my workout routine and this is the first week that I used my bodybuggSP to track how much I actually burn. Man, I was hoping it would be more, but oh well…it’s better than when I wasn’t doing anything on Sunday’s.
Workout time: 5:30AM – 6:45AM
- Basketball (easy shoot around): 5:30-5:47 = 200 calories
- Donuts (see workout below): 5:47-6:18 = 274 calories
- Eliptical: 6:18-6:42 = 172 calories
- Total calories burned = 558
Donuts workout:
- I do this on my gym’s basketball court
- Get two tires (one for flipping and one for dragging)
- The red line in the diagram is the first part…flip the tire for the length of the court and then run back to the starting point
- Sprint with the other tire the length of the court and then run around the entire court to the opposite side where both tires are now waiting
- Rest for 2 minutes
- Head the other way and do the exact same thing, except this time sprint with the tire going backwards
- Rest for 2 minutes, that is one complete set
- Repeat 2 more sets , which will end up being a total of 6 full court tires flip/pulls
As for gamifying this experience, the things I would do is:
- Have an iPhone app to track the experience and motivate me along the way
- There should be progression moments along the way and really used more for data collection/validation
- Ideally, after each full court completion I would want a timer to track how long that part of the set took me and then associate goals to try and beat
- If the workouts become uniform, which they could be, I would then have a leaderboard to “challenge” others doing the same thing
- Instant feedback would be nice…i.e. “High Score” trophy achievement for beating my time from last week
I think the gamification of wellness will be achieved through in gym activities and at-home engagement. The in-gym activities can be incentivized with achievements like I mentioned above, but they are tied more into getting the data into the game layer as opposed to the real motivators that the online experience should achieve.
All in all a fun morning and looking forward to still having the whole day free to do whatever I want knowing that I already burned 500+ calories.
Tags: achievement, badges, donut workout, leaderboard, tire workout
Well, now that the snafu of actually activating the bodybugg is over I got to set it up on the myapex.com site. It took about 30-45 minutes because of the assessment test. I think they need to gamify this portion specifically, because it is tedious to say the least. A simple progress bar would have been nice and then at the end give me a mission complete badge or something. This would allow a fairly simple onboarding experience into a game layer for tracking goals, sharing with friends, etc.
It also appears that they haven’t really updated the site in a while. Some parts of the assessment test are repetitive to earlier parts and for the bodybuggSP I guess you wear it on your left arm as opposed to the right arm with the older ones. In the pictures during setup all of the instructions say right arm, but the manual that comes with the unit says left arm. It’s a small thing, but if people are dishing out $200 at least take the time to sync up the manuals. It just seems tacky to not have that synced and appears like you don’t care.
After accepting all types of java script dialog box errors I finally got to the meat of the product which is figuring out what program is good…i.e. lose weight, gain weight, etc. I am trying to just change my body composition and surprisingly it has me needing 3500 calories per day. It sounds like a lot, so I may need to dig into that more.
The actual comfort of the unit on your arm isn’t that…it’s small enough to not be felt really. The sync to iPhone is OK, just need to hit a button on the unit, fire up my phone, and then off I go. Dashboard on there was pretty nice, but I just don’t have enough data yet to make it really interesting.
Next up, I am going to start tracking my food…my main concern there is that we cook so much on our own that it will be hard to define what we ate and then there will be over/under estimates on the actual calorie consumption.
The first goal I set is to lose 7 pounds in 12 weeks…we’ll see…
Tags: bodybugg setup
So I was all stoked to actually get my BodyBuggSP today which I ordered from 24hour Fitness. Got a great deal and for some reason their online store doesn’t charge tax or shipping…win/win situation!
Long story short, the damn thing wouldn’t register on the site. I had to call the 800 number at which point they needed to escalate the issue to “tech level 2″, which means I need to wait 24-48 hours for them to clear out that ID number so I can actually register it.
Nice one BodyBugg…FAIL!
UPDATE:
Well, they may have redeemed themselves as the “tech level 2″ people fixed it, so now I am up and running. Next post will be about setting this thing up.
Tags: bodybugg
Creating this site mainly to test out a few theories and hopefully answer a few questions:
- What motivates people to work out?
- Can validation devices motivate people?
- How hard is the bodybugg to keep up with?
- What motivates me to stay healthy?
- Will I be able to drop body fat %?
- If wellness were gamified how would I do it?
- Does my social graph motivate me more than strangers?
- More to come…