It’s mid-year and it’s time to ask: how goes your New Years Resolutions? For most of us, they remain elusive or even forgotten. But there are apps available today that are giving us hope that we’re finally on the road to making them happen. But that road is a hard one stay on so we’ll need all the help we can get. It’s not because they don’t want to, or don’t have the will to. It is because behavior change is hard. In fact, 88% of all resolutions end in failure.
If we could crack the behavior change code, it not only would make a lot of consumers more healthy, it would strengthen our economy and relieve the pains of large employers who are having to bear the burden of high insurance premiums. The average annual premium for family coverage through an employer reached $15,073 in 2011, an increase of 9 percent over the previous year. Obesity costs alone, according to a study from the Centers for Disease Control, may be as high as $147 billion a year, or roughly 9% of medical expenditures.
So what would it take to crack the behavior change code? One class of companies believes that data and information is the strongest motivator for change. Devices like Fitbit, Up, and Nike+ are part of the "quantified self" movement, where an expanding pool of electronic devices will be used to track your daily activity, including your steps, calories, sleep patterns, and other biometric data. Other companies like RunKeeper or MapMyRun take advantage of one device that many of us already carry around – the iPhone – and help track and record your latest run. According to Fitbit’s CEO, James Park, Fitbit gives consumers the ability to "gain deeper insight into your daily and monthly fitness and sleep levels with free online graphs and charts."
Other companies are taking a more horizontal approach to helping people accomplish goals. Lift, a company funded by the Obvious Corporation, wants to "put together a simple tool that would work reliably for all goals," by helping consumers "track results," and "improve iteratively." EveryMove just raised $2.6M from investors including Blue Cross to help consumers "live healthier lifestyles." Everymove wants consumers to record their health and fitness activities, which it converts to points for rewards and incentives within their health plans.
While academics have been studying behavior change for decades, a new body of literature is emerging that points out that information alone will rarely motivate people to change. Tina Rosenburg, Pulitzer prize winner and author of "Join the Club," asserts that the "more important and deeply rooted the behavior, the less impact information has." In her book she argues that "identification with a peer group can change people’s behavior when strategies based on information have failed." Perhaps one of the best known examples of this approach is Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), which works by regularly gathering a small group of people with a common goal – sobriety.
One company, named Cody and founded by Paul Javid and Pejman Pour-Moezzi, former Berkeley classmates and Microsofties, have taken Tina’s words to heart. They believe that relationships are the answer and, playing to the public’s fascination with Siri, are developing a virtual coach that helps you form a group with like-minded peers. Suppose you were training for a half-marathon. Cody would help you form a group with your running buddies and give you a private space to chat and check in your fitness activities (Ran 1.2 miles, Yoga for 45 minutes).
The coach, Cody, is like a proactive Siri that works with you in a group of friends. Cody will engage with you without your direct prompting, and give you encouragement, recommend activities, and organize support. He might even send you a funny song or video. To understand your activities, he connects to external fitness devices, and to provide tailored recommendations, he uses external APIs, such as Foursquare, Yelp, and Meetup.
Rochan Bhula, one Cody user stated "Cody keeps me motivated by turning my workouts into a friendly competition with friends. Seeing how long one friend ran, or getting a text from Cody that another friend just got done working out holds me accountable to keep up." While Cody is initially focused on fitness, the vision is that he could help with many types of goals from getting a new job, to learning to cook.
We need a solution that outperforms traditional success rates of behavior change. For the millions of us who, every year, want to change something about ourselves for the better, one thing has proven to be true. It’s hard. But as many companies today believe, anything is possible, and they are building the tools to help us get there.