Designing Health & Fitness Apps with the Mind in Mind - Massimo Ingegno (and other speakers)

We argue that other peoples’ failures provide a neglected source of managerial learning that is associated with enhanced learning transfer. Due to their negative valence, stories about other peoples’ failures as compared to stories about other peoples’ successes should elicit a more pronounced motivational response, such that people elaborate the content of failure stories more actively. As a consequence, the knowledge gained from failure stories will more likely be applied on a transfer task. We expect this motivational response to failure stories and its benefits for learning to be most pronounced for people who view failures as valuable learning opportunities. We report an experimental study, in which participants were exposed to a managerial training with stories about either managerial successes or managerial failures that delivered the same learning content. Results showed that stories about managerial failures led to more elaboration and learning transfer, in particular for participants who see the learning potential of failures. We discuss how failure stories can be used to stimulate managerial learning in educational and organizational settings.

0:00 Introduction 1:10 Principle 1: Identify the Objects 2:01 Principle 2: Identify the Numbers 3:04 Principle 3: Identify the Verbs 5:52 Principle 4: Set Bounds on Numbers 7:25 Principle 5: Build a Dashboard

In our coffee room experiment, we found that contributions to an honesty box for paying for coffee substantially increased when we stuck photocopied images of eyes on the wall in the coffee corner, compared to when we stuck images of flowers on the wall. This makes the point that people are generally nicer, more cooperative, more ethical, when they believe they are being watched, a point that I believe, in general terms, to be true.

This toolkit has been designed by the Research and Evaluation Unit (RIMU) at Auckland Council to be useful to those wishing to improve public programmes or services, policy development, or team decision-making. It draws on a range of existing resources produced by the Behavioural Insights Team, the OECD and others (see ‘other resources’ on the next page). This toolkit has two components that can be used either separately or together. The first component is a step-by-step process for developing a behavioural intervention. It guides the user through understanding existing behaviours, identifying a desired behaviour, brainstorming ideas for promoting the desired behaviour, and robustly testing the best ideas. The user should follow the steps in the order they are numbered. It is focused on key questions to ask at each step. It is not a complete guide to how to answer these questions, however, and the user may need to rely on other research and evaluation resources to help with each step. The second component of the toolkit is a series of ‘brainstorming’ cards. The cards cover many important behavioural principles to keep in mind when looking to improve programmes, policies, or decision-making. Each card includes a description of the behavioural principle, some examples, and suggestions for how to apply the principle. They can be used on their own or to brainstorm ideas as in the step-by-step process above. To help with navigation, the card set has been organised into a series for better services and a series for better decisionmaking, although there is overlap in the use of the cards. The former is marked with a red dot in the top left corner and the latter with a green dot.

If you’re looking for inspiration, it’s worth exploring “5 Levels,” a web series produced by the publication WIRED. In each episode, an expert in a subject breaks it down five ways – by talking with a young child, a teen, a college student, a graduate student studying the same topic, and a fellow expert.

In this chapter we explore three approaches to ensuring that an effective intervention does lead to impact: they are scaling, dissemination, and knowledge translation. Each pathway can increase your impact - i.e., desired behaviour and societal change - but approach this goal from different directions and with emphasis on different activities and outputs. We will introduce you to the three approaches before deep diving into when and how to apply each approach.

This is why augmented reality will inherit the earth. It will not only overshadow virtual reality as our primary gateway to the metaverse but will also replace the current ecosystem of phones and desktops as our primary interface to digital content. After all, walking down the street with your neck bent, staring at a phone in your hand is not the most natural way to experience content to the human perceptual system. Augmented reality is, which is why I firmly believe that within 10 years, AR hardware and software will become dominant, overshadowing phones and desktops in our lives.

Taking your offering to market requires a clear message that resonates with the audience. Your message is meaningful or meaningless: either your message aligns with the dominant cultural narrative and is accepted relatively easy, or your message must alter the cultural narrative before it gains widespread acceptance. Progressive ideas shift the dominant narrative, often at great cost to the messenger. Martin Luther King, like Moses, did not live to enter into the Promised Land. What makes a message convincing? What is a narrative? What makes it dominant? How does a message gain cultural acceptance? How does one shift or disrupt a cultural narrative? We will attempt to answer these questions by drawing on a number of diverse ideas and integrating them into a practical model.

On the whole, however, these behavioral interventions have been somewhat underwhelming, exposing an inherent brittleness that comes from three common “errors of projection” in current behavioral design methodology: projected stability, which insufficiently plans for the fact that interventions often function within inherently unstable systems; projected persistence, which neglects to account for changes in those system conditions over time; and projected value, which assumes that definitions of success are universally shared across contexts. Borrowing from strategic design and futures thinking, a new proposed strategic foresight model—behavioral planning—can help practitioners better address these system-level, anticipatory, and contextual weaknesses by more systematically identifying potential forces that may impact behavioral interventions before they have been implemented. Behavioral planning will help designers more effectively elicit signals indicating the emergence of forces that may deform behavioral interventions in emergent COVID-19 contexts, and promote “roughly right” directional solutions at earlier stages in solution development to better address system shifts.

Having a standardized unit of measure for risk would be helpful for our personal calculations, but it could also become a core part of the way the media or public health authorities talk about threats like epidemic disease, or even seasonal flu. Post-COVID—if we ever get there—I suspect I will still be interested to know if the flu risk starts to climb in New York, even by a few micromorts—I wouldn’t radically change my plans, but I might put on a mask in the subway for a few weeks. For the past seventy years, every single local news broadcast has been telling you what the temperature is going to be tomorrow, and the chance of precipitation. Why shouldn’t they also include genuinely life-or-death odds?

A difficulty for investigating the accuracy of everyday risks perception has been the lack of an obvious objective framework on which to compare subjective responses. This difficulty stands in contrast to other fields of risk research. For example, risk perception in health contexts, uses the probability of death or ill health (e.g. as compiled by disease data registries) as the objective comparator [2, 3, 27]; and in financial fields, losses and gains in gambling tasks can be used as an objective comparator [28, 29]. In the current study the concept of MicroMorts is introduced as an objective risk framework to investigate the accuracy of everyday risk perception. We have around a one in a million chance of dying from an accident or incident every day, and this acute risk is quantified as one MicroMort [30, 31]. That is, MicroMorts are units that index acute risk (i.e. sudden death): one MicroMort is a one-in-a-million chance of death. We increase our risk through our choices of activities, for example, skydiving has a MicroMort value of 10, walking 27 miles has a MicroMort value of one, and giving birth has a MicroMort value of 120 (i.e. 10, 1 or 120 chance in a million chance of dying respectively) [31]. MicroMorts enable us to compare the acute risk of death from various activities, for example, a general anaesthetic and a sky-dive both carry the same acute risk of death, 10 MicroMorts (10 in one million people will die as a result of doing either). This MicroMort framework is being increasingly being used to index health risks and provide a framework for risk communication, including patient consent [31–33]

Syndromic surveillance systems monitor disease indicators to detect emergence of diseases and track their progression. Here, we report on a rapidly deployed active syndromic surveillance system for tracking COVID‑19 in Israel. The system was a novel combination of active and passive components: Ads were shown to people searching for COVID‑19 symptoms on the Google search engine. Those who clicked on the ads were referred to a chat bot which helped them decide whether they needed urgent medical care. Through its conversion optimization mechanism, the ad system was guided to focus on those people who required such care. Over 6 months, the ads were shown approximately 214,000 times and clicked on 12,000 times, and 722 people were informed they needed urgent care. Click rates on ads and the fraction of people deemed to require urgent care were correlated with the hospitalization rate ( R2=0.54 and R2=0.50 , respectively) with a lead time of 9 days. Males and younger people were more likely to use the system, and younger people were more likely to be determined to require urgent care (slope: −0.009 , P=0.01 ). Thus, the system can assist in predicting case numbers and hospital load at a significant lead time and, simultaneously, help people determine if they need medical care.

Key trends, people, companies, and projects to watch across the crypto landscape, with predictions for 2022

Leveraging artificial intelligence (AI)–driven apps for health education and promotion can help in the accomplishment of several United Nations sustainable development goals. SnehAI, developed by the Population Foundation of India, is the first Hinglish (Hindi + English) AI chatbot, deliberately designed for social and behavioral changes in India. It provides a private, nonjudgmental, and safe space to spur conversations about taboo topics (such as safe sex and family planning) and offers accurate, relatable, and trustworthy information and resources.

A new meta-analysis published in PNAS by Stephanie Mertens, Mario Herberz, Ulf J. J. Hahnel, and Tobias Brosch provides more evidence about the effectiveness of nudges. Here’s a summary:

Broadly, these feedback surveys can be categorised into five groups: the pointless; the self-important; the immoral; the demanding; and the downright weird:

The SMART acronym (e.g., Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Timebound) is a highly prominent strategy for setting physical activity goals. While it is intuitive, and its practical value has been recognised, the scientific underpinnings of the SMART acronym are less clear. Therefore, we aimed to narratively review and critically examine the scientific underpinnings of the SMART acronym and its application in physical activity promotion. Specifically, our review suggests that the SMART acronym: is not based on scientific theory; is not consistent with empirical evidence; does not consider what type of goal is set; is not applied consistently; is lacking detailed guidance; has redundancy in its criteria; is not being used as originally intended; and has a risk of potentially harmful effects. These issues are likely leading to sub-optimal outcomes, confusion, and inconsistency. Recommendations are provided to guide the field towards better practice and, ultimately, more effective goal setting interventions to help individuals become physically active.

The presentarticle reviews the debate and research on nudges byfocusing on three main dimensions: (1) the exact defi-nition of nudges; (2) the justification of nudge policies,with a focus on “libertarian paternalism”; and (3) theeffectiveness of nudges, both over time and in compari-son with standard policies.

The UN Refugee Agency’s Project Unsung is a speculative storytelling project that brings together creative collaborators from around the world to help reimagine the humanitarian sector and promote narrative change and foresight in our work. The worlds produced through mediums such as non-fiction essays, science fiction, poetry, art and illustration, create visions for how we might radically reimagine our work with communities, our organizations, and our relationships to each other and the planet. The collection is framed across three overarching issues that we believe to be critical for building just futures: Nature (restoring and repairing the world by confronting climate change and ecological loss); Identity (fostering belonging, connection, and kinship); Power (reimaging and reconfiguring power dynamics and social transformation through decolonizing, localizing, and building solidarity across difference). The story of humanitarian innovation needs a new chapter. Join us in imagining better worlds.

Excellent contrast with Embrace Life of gain vs loss framing!

Emotions and worries can reduce individuals’ available attention and affect economic decisions. In a four-week experiment with 2,384 US adults, offering free access to a popular mindfulness meditation app (Headspace) that costs $13 per month improves mental health, productivity and decisionmaking. First, it causes a 0.44 standard deviation reduction in symptoms of stress, anxiety, and depression, comparable to the impacts of expensive in-person therapy, with improvements even among participants with minimal or mild symptoms at baseline. Second, it increases earnings on a proofreading task by 1.9 percent. Third, it makes decision-making more stable across emotional states, reducing the interference of personal worries with risk choices. Overall, our results demonstrate the potential of affordable mindfulness meditation apps to improve mental health, productivity, and the impact of emotions on economic decisions.

Method:Three participatory workshops were held with the independent Welsh residential decarbonisation advisory group(‘the Advisory Group’)to (1)maprelationships betweenactors, behavioursand influences onbehaviourwithin thehome retrofitsystem,(2)provide training in the Behaviour Change Wheel framework(3)use these to developpolicy recommendationsfor interventions. Recommendations were analysed usingthe COM-B (capability, opportunity, motivation) model of behaviourtoassesswhether they addressed these factors. Results:Twobehavioural systems mapswere produced,representing privately rented and owner-occupied housing tenures. The main causal pathways and feedback loops in each map are described.

The Book of Behavior Change is an Open Access book that helps with the development of effective behavior change interventions as well as doing research into behavior change. Unlike for example Intervention Mapping, this book does not provide a complete protocol, instead focusing on identifying what to target, and how to target it, to maximize intervention effectiveness.

EMERGE (Evidence-based Measures of Empowerment for Research on Gender Equality) is a project focused on gender equality and empowerment measures to monitor and evaluate health programs and to track progress on UN Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 5: To Achieve Gender Equality and Empower All Girls. As reported by UN Women (2018), only 2 of the 14 SDG 5 indicators have accepted methodologies for measurement and data widely available. Of the remaining 12, 9 are indicators for which data are collected and available in only a limited number of countries. This assessment suggests notable measurement gaps in the state of gender equality and empowerment worldwide. EMERGE aims to improve the science of gender equality and empowerment measurement by identifying these gaps through the compilation and psychometric evaluation of available measures and supporting scientifically rigorous measure development research in India.

Which theory of behavior change can help you plan a health communication intervention for a large audience? There is no single right answer, but some theories will fit your needs better than others. The purpose of this tool is to rank-order some commonly used theories by their degree of fit with your behavior change challenge.

So Limaye and Johns Hopkins have created a free two-hour course on the online platform Coursera that's open to anyone. It's called COVID Vaccine Ambassador Training: How to Talk to Parents. Their goal is to prepare everyone, from principals to PTA presidents, to counter misinformation with empathy and, ultimately, to move more people to seek out the lifesaving vaccine.