All, briefly introduce yourself (in speaking order)
Kaiser Permanente’s Center for Total Health presented definitions of total health from industry leaders; they included many different factors, but all recognized the importance of exercise
We will talk about a technology-centered solution to help people achieve better total health by motivating people to establish regular exercise habits
We will apply strategies based on analytics to achieve our goal
Our solution utilizes Kaiser Permanente’s app, Every Body Walk!, which is part of KP’s broader campaign to get people moving.
Studies show that brisk walking for 150 minutes per week can provide huge health benefits. This will be our target metric.
Through allowing users to set fitness goals and track statistics on walks, Every Body Walk makes this easier and more fun.
The app has tracked nearly 1 million walks to-date. However, retention rates are in line with that of other health and fitness apps – about 30% of users remain engaged after 3 months.
Long term retention is hard -- it plays on the behavioral and environmental aspects of a user
Using analytics, we can better understand these behavioral and environmental factors and develop features to drive long-term engagement, and with that, better total health
Like Nic said, to engage users in an app-based exercise routine, we must truly understand and design for each of their unique needs. I’ll give two examples of how we can use data collected through the app and from public sources to do that.
First, we can use analytics to understand communities, which have a huge influence on people’s health.
The map above shows disparities in access to exercise opportunities (such as safe parks, community pools, or health clubs) by county, from the Community Health Needs Assessment platform. The black dots mark where our app users are walking.
Knowing about the exercise opportunities in each user’s community allows us to personalize our approach to help users make the most of what’s around them. For example, we would suggest a lunch break walk in the park as opposed to a morning walk if we knew the user worked in a safe, well-manicured area but lived in an community with fewer exercise opportunities.
Second, we can use analytics to understand individuals, and when they might need an extra boost of motivation. For example, we found that last month, fewer users recorded walks on the weekends.
This may be because they switched to other fitness activities, such as a pickup game of soccer with their family, but it could also be because they simply got too busy taking care of life’s other demands to fit in exercise.
Knowing about patterns like this at the individual level empowers us to help our users close gaps in their fitness routines. For example, we could kindly suggest a free time on their phone’s Saturday's calendar to block out for a walk after seeing that they’d stopped going for their weekly Saturday walk.
Now we’ll give an example of how intimately knowing our users could help us personalize their experience and inspire them to meet their exercise goals
Meet Tom:
Personal info: He’s a 55 year-old father of two and lives in Seattle
Habits: He shops at Walgreens and has a weakness for McDonald’s
Lifestyle: He loves watching boxing and sports movies and enjoys playing tennis and works at a desk job
Tom wants to lose weight and has set a goal to walk 150 minutes per week. We’ll design his experience to help him achieve that.
Knowing Tom, here’s how we’d use the Everybody Walk app as a platform to help Tom meet his goals:
Give heads up about rainy days coming up so Tom can get his walking time in early and still meet his weekly goal
Connect Tom to Walgreens, who will give him points and discounts for reaching his weight and exercise goals
Design app to feature the statistics that Tom wants to know -- time walked, calorie burn, even feature a fun infographic of cumulative Big Macs burned off
Send motivational quotes from Rocky Balboa and encouraging messages from his daughter
Let him know about upcoming free, local tennis meetup events, through KP Move
Engage him in team-based company events and competitions that utilize the EBW app
As time goes on, we can use analytics to hone in on what really works for Tom. After he downloaded the app…
We tailored our motivational strategy to his unique context, interests, and goals
As he uses the app, we can analyze feedback from him as well as data on his behavior and the behavior of others to hone in on what works best to empower him to achieve his goals
We can then modify his experience and update the app to better motivate him to reach his goals
Through using analytics in combination with the Everybody Walk app, we hope to empower Tom and others like him to reach their exercise goals and thereby improve their total health. We’ll do this through:
Continuously collecting data to understand our users and their behavior
Continuously rolling out new motivational features, tips, and rewards and iterating to hone in on what works best
Continuously focusing on developing ways to not only change people’s exercise habits but their lifestyles, enabling them, like Tom, to reach for and achieve better total health.