At Lean Startup Machine in Toronto this past weekend, participating teams were asked to pitch a viable business idea and then test it out (read our wrap up here). There was no end of creativity in the room, but some concepts stuck out as more intriguing than others. The Standard chose to highlight a couple of the most promising ideas.
Gamification has a bad rap; its habit of using badges and points to drive “customer engagement” (ugh) resembles the very worst of modern marketing. But what if those game-like elements could be used to help people? Like, say, to help people manage medical conditions such as diabetes?
Deebo hopes to do just that. The idea comes from Conor Holler, a diabetic himself, and who is aiming to create a system that will incentivize people to take positive steps to look after their diabetes.
“Recording data is a necessary part of being a diabetc,” says Holler, “but it doesn’t have to be unpleasant. Deebo is almost like re-skinning data collection as a pleasant thing.”
Much like Nike + helps runners track and measure their progress in running, Deebo aims to do something similar for tracking blood sugar and other important metrics. The concept for the service is a combination of a web site and a mobile app. In its first iteration, users will manually upload their data and, depending on their progress, they will first be given digital rewards, with real-world rewards to come down the road. By applying the concept of points and prizes to diabetes treatment, Holler hopes that an otherwise boring, frustrating part of life for diabetics might be made more fun. Given diabetics’ need for consistency in treatment, it would help them to stay healthy too.
But while the benefits of Deebo to diabetics themselves are clear, Holler also envisions the service as a complete, sustainable ecosystem. His goal is for real-world rewards to be health-related, such as discounts from Whole Foods or gyms, which would simultaneously provide visibility to those companies and a revenue model for Deebo. Moreover, the data culled from users could be beneficial to the medical community, particularly when matched with other behavioural metrics.
It’s certainly a promising idea–but not one without flaws. For the purposes of both real-world rewards and medical data, the information users provide would have to be vetted somehow, lest people attempt to game the game, so to speak. Such a solution would likely require Deebo to integrate with the makers of glucose meters, no simple feat given how conservative pharmaceutical companies can be.
Nonetheless, for all its problems, gamification is at its best when it turns necessary, mundane tasks into something enjoyable. And if it can succeed in making diabetes management more engaging and less frustrating, Deebo may make gamification just a little more palatable.
Navneet Alang is Toronto Standard’s tech critic. Follow him on Twitter at @navalang.
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