Early last week I was talking with my best friend about how often each of us exercises and the excise routine of a colleague of his came up. He noted that due to this woman’s asthma she really doesn’t exercise; she doesn’t like to run, or bike or swim because of the fear of having an asthma attack. We went on to discuss how she cares about her health but feels limited in what she can do to improve her approach to maintaining health living practices. Our conversation led to work on how social media and personal technologies can be used to guide individual health practices and how our work at HHS is helping use data resources to support the development of these applications.
One of those apps is 100Plus, an application that aims at making health care easier. As an example, 100Plus gives users the opportunity to incorporate healthy decisions into everyday life by breaking those decisions into small incremental steps. Based on those decisions, government data (CDC’s Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance and National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey data) and private data (Practice Fusion), 100Plus gives the user a life score and that score changes based on the decisions the user makes.
At last year’s South by Southwest Conference (SXSW), 100Plus debuted their concept with the creation of a mini app called 100Proof. 100Proof was developed to track attendees’ alcohol consumption while at SXSW. What the application did was measure the user’s alcohol consumption and compare it to the U.S. average and the average at SXSW (based on other users) and based on how much a user drank his/her life score would change.
For instance, say a user drank five drinks the previous night. To calculate how that affected a user’s life score, 100Proof (like 100Plus) asked for the user’s sex, age, and weight. From there, the user’s life score changes, either improving or declining. In this example, the user’s life score declined. But 100Proof doesn’t stop there; it then gives users options to reverse the negative effects of drinking the night before, by giving healthy suggestions like taking a bike ride to burn the 1,000 calories off that were consumed the night before.
100Plus builds on the concepts displayed in 100Proof. 100Plus makes small suggestions like taking the longer walking route to work or using the stairs. When asked, a user of 100Plus, had this to say about the app:
“The 100Plus app has definitely made me look for small opportunities to do things differently. I'm an all-out kind of person - if I'm going for a run, I'm running 5 miles. If I need a cardio class, I'll be at the dance studio for three hours. But often, life gets too crazy, and we can fall into the "nothing" side of "all-or-nothing." The app has helped me remember that small steps are useful and helpful to the overall picture - that something is better than nothing!”
It is through these incremental changes that people can improve their health. The user went on to explain how the tracking feature in 100Plus has made a huge difference, “Often times we don't realize how healthy / unhealthy we are until we see the number on the scale change. But our bodies respond to all sorts of things in all sorts of ways - we just have to know what to look for and how to find it.”
We are seeing the development and evolution of more applications and devices that leverage individual health data to help people track and manage their health. We started off with a simple device like the Fitbit but we have moved past just tracking steps to now tracking more complex behaviors that are integrated in to people’s everyday lives, just like the colleague of my best friend.
More information on 100Plus can be found at 100plus.com.
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