In an attempt to weave health data into other aspects of life, Aaron Coleman developed a Flappy Birds-like game app that uses data recorded by a person’s Fitbit to control its difficulty.
“There’s plenty of literature that suggests keeping people mindful of their daily physical activity level makes them more likely to increase it,” he said. “There are also lots of health games meant to be played at the gym, during a run or in front of a screen. The goal with Tappy Fit was that the sum total of movement from your entire day, week or month is what influences the gameplay.”
Tappy Fit was released in the App Store today. Users sync their Fitbit account to the app, which adjusts the layout and difficulty of the game based on their step data. Players navigate a flying sneaker – “Tappy” – through a series of obstacles. The more steps they’ve taken, the bigger the gap is between the pipes they have to navigate the sneaker through.
The goal, then, is to motivate users to take more steps.
“We see this as just one example of how we can start to make our health data bleed into other areas of our lives, almost like subliminal messages, to encourage you to be more active while you play a fun game during a work break,” Coleman said.
Several digital health device makers, including Fitbit and Jawbone, make their APIs available to other developers, opening the door for others to think up creative ways to use health data.
Coleman is calling Tappy Fit an experiment in seeing how people interact with their own data. “This is just our first experiment in trying to change the conversation around our personal health data from staring at charts to having fun with interesting and maybe even silly experiences,” he said. “Regardless of if we see any impact with Tappy Fit there are lots of other experiments we and organizations we might partner with intend to run in the future.”
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
Coleman was part of a team that developed a calorie-tracking app that won the Healthy Apps for Kids Challenge in 2010, part of Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move campaign. He started Small Steps Labs by developing an analytic tool for physical activity research, Fitabase, that’s being used in dozens of academic studies.
