THE SCIENCE

Healthcare costs of obesity estimated at over $2 trillion per year, obesity is the 2nd most preventable cause of cancer

The average gamer is a 35-year-old man who is overweight.

Gamification of exercise via video games has shown a 25% increase in users exercise

Pokemon Go players collectively walked 8.7 Billion

Gamification increases motivation and participation in exercise, lowering risks for chronic disease.

At LVLFi, our post-doctoral scientists have used behavioural economics
combined with the latest research on gamification and reward-based
motivation to design a highly effiective way to encourage our users to
engage with our app and to be more active.

Our app is designed to trigger activation of a midbrain dopaminergic response into the ventral striatum, encouraging reinforcement learning of pre-identified positive behaviour (taking steps, reading prescribed articles), while utilising random reward over-estimation via ‘loot crate’ gaming mechanics to further increase dopaminergic release to the mesolimbic pathway.

What does this mean? We have designed our app and games to be fun and engaging for the player, but are built upon understood scientific techniques to optimise enjoyment and motivation to help our users take more steps and get healthier, lowering their risk for chronic disease and fight obesity.

OBESITY

Being overweight is a growing problem. Both for those who are above their correct Body Mass index (BMI) and for society as a whole.

Some facts on Obesity:

In 2015, a total of 107.7 million children and 603.7 million adults were obese. Since 1980, the prevalence of obesity has doubled in more than 70 countries and has continuously increased in most other countries.


74% of Americans are overweight. 36% are both overweight and obese.
Obesity is estimated to cost $2 trillion a year globally.


Obesity reduces life expectancy by 3 years, and severe obesity reduces life expectancy by 8-10 years.


According to the Milken Institute, obesity costs the USA alone $1.4 trillion, currently $64 billion is being spent on diet and weight loss products that are not having a long term impact on the problem.

Problems with Obesity

Obesity is a leading cause of chronic disease, such as Diabetes, Cancer and Cardiovascular Disease.


75% of medical spending is on chronic disease.


Reducing obesity reduces risks for chronic disease.

GAMIFICATION

When we talk about gamification, what exactly is it? We prefer playing games over doing what we think of as boring tasks, even if we know those tasks are good for us in the long run.
So by turning those tasks into something like a game by adding game elements (leader boards, points, levels, badges etc), we are more likely to be interested and more motivated forthat task. Or:

“The primary goal of gamification, applying a game design to a real-life context for non-gaming purposes is in order to provide the user with the motivation to perform a certain activity that may otherwise be overlooked”

(Sailer et al 2017)

Good gamification should elicit all 4 main pleasure drivers in the brain:

Bringing these together, we get a slightly longer explanation for gamification:

Game design elements can deliberately be used to alter real life contexts such as exercising, and healthy living. The need for conpetence for example can be addressed by allowing the user to play along side their peers, with the use of a leader board, points and badges that are
directly achieved by completing certain activities linked to the end goal of the game. The need for autonomy is addressed by creating avatars that allow the user to make their own decisions and offer freedom of choice. Finally, by creating a story that offers a narrative
frame allowing the player to have a feeling of belonging can affect social relatedness.”
(Sailer 2017)

GAMIFICATION OF EXCERCISE

(aka Customer Wellness)

Gamification has long been proven to be able to motivate people to exercise more. Our ownapp has shown a 19% increase in steps by the users, and some of our competitors who also use basic gamification have shown a similar increase in step count.

In particular, video games that incorporate exercise have shown great improvements in user step count. In particular, Pokemon Go was a mass market free to download mobile game that had some impressive statistics:
“We are pleased to share that—as of December 7 (2016, 5 months after release)—the Pokémon GO community has collectively walked more than 8.7 billion kilometres (5 Billion Miles).

That’s more than 200,000 trips around Earth! Fun fact: A commercial jetliner would take more than 1,000 years to cover the same distance. While covering this distance, Trainers also caught more than 88 billion Pokémon along the way. That’s roughly 533 million Pokémon a day!”

That walking, has led to over 100 million lbs of weight being lost.
But gamifying walking is not all that is possible for your employees or insured population.
We can also gamify the use of meditation/mental health apps, nutrition and smoking
cessation programs.
“Did you know that an employee that smokes combustible cigarettes costs businesses an
average of $5816 per year?”

GAMIFICATION OF
CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT

How do you get your insured population to open your app? One Insurer we know of had less than 10% of their customers log on to their website once a year, with the rest not even doing that. By offering a walking app with basic prizes and gamification, they managed a 75% monthly engagement and 35% daily.
Offering a gamified app that gives prizes, rewards, games and fun to users is a much more appealing way to engage your insured populations compared to traditional methods of bulk emails/letters.