As time passes, technology continues to progress at an exponential rate. The CEO's of technology corporations are urging their employees to come up with more and more ways in which technology can make our lives better. At the same time, our world is becoming more focused on our health; physically, mentally, nutritionally, emotionally.
The intersection of these two modern-day movements occurs in Health-related gamification, a topic I have explored in the past two weeks. I've found it fascinating to learn of the vast impact this process has on people throughout all different levels of organizations. It's used in games, apps, military and corporate training, to name just a few.
Gamification is being used in companies to influence the health of the very same engineers that develop technology and gaming systems, to begin with. In the video below, Charlie Kim, CEO of Enterprise states that his company benefitted immensely upon the modification of its employee's health behaviors, specifically getting them to exercise more frequently. This was accomplished quite successful once they used gamification.
Kim speaks of several breakthroughs they discovered along this journey. Among them, they found that gift cards and cash did not actually motivate people to get active. Instead, people were more likely to be motivated by team competitions documented on leaderboards. They reacted positively to being rewarded with simple recognition and old-fashioned bragging rights.
They also found that individuals responded positively to scheduled meetings with personal trainers, that were accessible to the top performers in the company first. This offered incentive to those who were willing to put in the most work. I like the idea of the reward becoming available to those who put the most work in. I also find it progressive and beneficial that said "reward" is something like being able to meet with a Personal Trainer. This is progress towards using beneficial and healthy rewards and is a very positive thing in my opinion.
In most cases, exercise can be tracked and recorded using fitness trackers, a concept we discussed heavily last week. Fitness trackers are able to recognize the exercise, count steps, calories, active minutes and more. The idea is that companies will then use this data in comparison to other employee's data and make a game out of trying to see who works out more-therefore, who is doing more for their health.
This data can even be compiled by another self-quantifying website such as the one created by Anand Sharma, called Aprilzero. This article by Jamie Todd Rubin describes how the app pulls data from several other health tracking apps such as Foursquare, Moves, and Cardiio. It then creates graphs, maps and other visual elements to aid in understanding the data. The categories that they are broken down into are Sport, Explorer, and Journal. The thing that struck me about this, was that the Explorer option showed a live feed of his exact location at that very moment.
Although I do understand how this is an interesting fact that can be motivational and inspirational to individuals who follow his world travels, I can't help but wonder what would happen if this information got into the wrong hands. It's unfortunate that we must think of things like that, but it's the plain truth of the world we live in.
This worry is not one that is without reason. In 2015, local Health Insurance company Excellus Blue Cross Blue Sheild informed the world that they had been the victim of a data breech in which 10 million members' sensitive information was stolen. The data stolen includes social security numbers, mailing addresses, birth dates, and credit card numbers.
After learning about this in class, I called my parents at home to ask if this affected any of us since I knew this was our Health Insurance Carrier. They were notified by a letter in the mail that their information had been identified as among those that were potentially stolen. Because of this, they were given the option to sign up for extra monthly protection for a year. And yet they are still receiving this extra protection for it, nearly 3 years later.
My question is, why is this necessary? Is this not ample time to try to fix the data breach? Why were they not able to fix it within the years time they anticipated being able to? Will they ever be able to ensure my parents that their confidential information is truly safe?
The fact that they may need these sorts of precautions for this long after the original data breach denotes the alarming fact that we truly never know what is happening to the information we put out on the internet.
Yes, there are all sorts of cool gadgets, applications, and games for us to track, organize, and analyze our health data. But where is all that information really going? Unfortunately, that is simply not a question any amount of gamificationation can answer, as good-hearted and health improving as it may be.