Behavior Change, Health 2.0, and the Unmentionables

Posted: October 26th, 2010 | Author: John | Tags: #health2con, behavior change, health 2.0, healthcare, insights, interaction design | 3 Comments »

Now that a couple weeks have gone by, I thought I’d put together a quick overview of a couple of the most compelling panels of the Health 2.0 conference–the ones that actually stuck with me. One session in particular was memorable and worth revisiting.

The session was entitled Behavior Change, Health 2.0, and the Unmentionables and focused on some of the most taboo and difficult subjects in health behavior change, Obesity, Mental Health, and Sex.

Susannah Fox, of the Pew Internet Project, was the curator what of what she called the “Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll” panel and kicked it off with the admonition to live well, love yourself and others. She framed the conversation around some of the most taboo and difficult subjects in health behavior change, Obesity, Mental Health, and Sex. This session had five of the most compelling presenters of the entire conference.

Ron Gutman of HealthTap

Ron asked the question: “how can we engage people in health?” and went on to talk about how a focus on user experience was critical to ensuring actionable results. Games, he pointed out are successful at motivating people because of their inherent milestones, goals and measurements. “Real life doesn’t have this platform” he observed, possibly shedding some light on what HealthTap is up to.

Richard Tate of HopeLab

The HopeLab product, Zamzee is a compelling social game that encourages young people (again with rewards, notifications, and other social game mechanics) to engage in physical activity to combat childhood obesity. HopeLab’s mission is to use make health engagement fun for children in order to build positive behaviors.

Doug Solomon, CTO of IDEO

IDEO was given a communication design challenge (I forget the agency that commissioned them) to reduce unwanted pregnancy in the 18 – 29 year old population in California. Doug described their design brief as “changing behavior in the face of one of the most powerful biological urges on the planet.” bedside.org gives a glimpse of the campaign they developed.

Ramin Bastani, Founder, Qpid.me

Ramin had the best one liner: “Spreading the love, nothing else.” He demoed their (fully HIPAA compliant!) product designed to provide a secure (but sharable) registry of STD test results that a user can share with a potential sexual partner via text message in the moment when they need it most.

Alexandra Drane of Eliza

Finally, Ms. Drane pointed out some of the real-life factors (anxiety about relationships, stress, sex, money, etc.) that keep us from changing our health behaviors even when we want to. Her call to action was to provide support for all of the mental and behavioral factors not just the usual suspects, diet and exercise, if we want to achieve lasting health change.

I took away some key insights from these talks that I’ve been applying in my work in interaction design:

• milestones and measurements can be great tools to leverage to increase engagement and motivation toward a goal
• yes, we should simplify data entry and access to health information, but in order to drive action we need to offer people improved knowledge about their health situation
• we should “meet people where they are” speak in a tone of voice appropriate to the topic, in their own vernacular
• don’t forget to be human. Weed out industry jargon and use plain language.
• broaden our support for the issues that impact a person’s ability to achieve to behavior change, not just the target behaviors themselves
• don’t get distracted by the technology, focus on real human problems and how to solve them.

References

#health2con – Behavior Change Health 2.0 and the Unmentionables @susannahfox

Talk to me healthy, baby – Health 2.0 gets personal

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