Keeping to a regimen of medications or nutritional supplements is the kind of thing that helps ensure long-term health, but getting into a new habit that doesn't have short-term benefits is often difficult for many to get behind.
To that end, Mango Health out of San Francisco has allied with Target on a pilot program that looks to provide the short-term benefits that often help people get into new habits.
Mango Health's new app allows users to get rewarded for correctly following instructions regarding medications or nutritional supplements, by reporting their successes to an app. But it's not just about the short-term rewards, as the Mango Health app also allows users to get more information about the medications and supplements they're taking, including being able to check for things like interactions between various medications—especially between any medications currently being taking—as well as the interactions with various foods.
Users even get reminders regarding dosages for those times when they forget whether it's one pill twice a day or two pills once a day.
Mango Health is backed by a $3.1-million seed funding round from a variety of investors, including First Round Capital and Baseline Ventures, and for setting up the pilot program—set to last 16 weeks—joined up with retailer Target in order to provide gift cards.
Conversely, users can make charitable donations instead of taking gift cards.
The idea of gamification—taking game-related elements and applying these elements to situations outside of a normal gaming environment—isn't a new idea in healthcare. Gamification itself has already been put to wide use in a variety of different fields, especially marketing, to better influence certain outcomes. The practice allows people to take advantage of natural impulses to compete and even allow for what behavioral psychologists call ‘reinforcement techniques’ to perform specific tasks and receive rewards for these tasks beyond the intrinsic.
It helps reinforce a behavior, and reinforced behaviors are, in turn, more likely to be repeated.
When it comes to healthcare topics, many gains are more long term than anything else, and actually require people to ignore short-term gains—indeed, even embrace short-term losses—in favor of long-term gains. Those engaging in better healthcare practices, for example, are required to give up the short-term gain of a tasty cookie or a relaxing evening of watching television, in favor of comparatively worse healthy snacks or exercise with the goal of better health in the future.
Adding gamification elements to these tasks adds the short-term reinforcement that many believe is necessary for ultimate success.
Mango Health's idea to channel the competitive urge into a field, where there isn't much in the way of near-term gratification, is a smart one, though it’ll be particularly interesting to see what kind of response the program has when it finally concludes.
Edited by
Braden Becker
