GAMELY IS A PLATFORM TO BUILD “INFLUENCER GAMES” ON DEMAND THAT TRIGGER, MEASURE, ASSESS AND INFLUENCE INDIVIDUAL AND GROUP BEHAVIOR IN HUMANS AND INTELLIGENT MACHINES.
Healthcare gamification market is projected to reach $4B by 2022 [3].
The whole gamification Industry is projected to reach $22.9B at the same time [2]. Despite the huge potential of applying the best of gamification principles in healthcare and wellness domain to help people pick up good habits and get rid of bad ones, there are some fundamental limitations of the current app-based approach that are preventing wide-scale adoption both by the influencers/change agents (game makers) and the beneficiary end users (gamers). Only 4% of around 1700 smart health/wellness related apps, according to a recent NIH study [5], included gamification. They are all employing different gamification techniques to influence effective behavior change. Worst of all, they all use proprietary ways to handle even the same type of data and different modes of reporting to measure and assess outcomes. There is, a huge unmet need for a standard way of triggering, measuring and assessing effective behavior outcome. At the same time, we need to lower the barrier of using gamification for change makers and make the games much more interesting (rewarding) and frictionless.
From Change agent’s perspective, gamification is too costly or complex or both.
(a) The power to build games rest on game making vendors, not domain experts. (b) Finding proprietary apps and worse, developing custom ones for each “cause” is cost prohibitive (e.g. a game to quit smoking, a game to stop DUI and so on). (c) The standard practice to measure, report and assess the extent of “Influence” through the survey is costly. (d) There is no mechanism to measure, report, assess the effectiveness of the campaign in near real time. (e) Providing personal change agents to constantly mentor and advise the participants – to maximize effective behavior outcome – is very costly and does not scale. (f) There is no elegant mechanism to trigger group behavior through gamification and quantify and measure group outcomes in a vendor, platform, device, app agnostic way.
From beneficiary end user’s perspective, gamification is too boring or complex or both.
(a) too much time commitment, (b) some games are too complex to play, (c) it’s a lonely experience and quickly gets boring, (d) cannot play in groups and compete with each other, (e) lack of mentorship during the effective behavior forming period. (e) Most games require gamers to have smart phones, (f) most do not allow anonymous participation (a necessary element for some cases like alcohol anonymous).
This is why, till now, gamification in healthcare and wellness domain is treated as “a nice to have” and not “a must have” by both the change makers and beneficiary end users.
All this is about to change. We have a Game Changing Game Maker Platform, called Gamely.
Gamely empowers Change Makers make and publish influencer games on demand, without coding. It lets them define clear, multi-dimensional Habitual Indexes, Trends and Milestones. A game maker API and wizard let change agents themselves design and publish Simple On-demand Games (SOGs). To begin with, SOGs are simple Q&A based games with a single specific desired effective behavior as outcome. SOGs are very focused and takes very little commitment from the beneficiary end user, typically less than 30 seconds per engagement. SOGs can be played individually, anonymously, in groups and as Massive Multi Player Games (MMPGs). Moreover, Gamely lets change agents design AI powered, non-judgmental mentor agents that learn and optimize advice to maximize probability of effective behavior outcome.
The Influencer games, published from the Gamely platform, allow participation via multiple communication channels (text, email, mobile app, web app). The games are designed to trigger individual and group participation and measure engagement in near real time using custom, multi-dimensional Habitual Indexes and Trends. It lets stake holders assess effective behavior outcomes in near real time without the need for costly surveys. The games keep it exciting with near real-time game stats, individual / group leaderboards, real world rewards through hyper contextual offers from sponsors and social cheering.
Gamely is an open, extensible platform. While we will build a portfolio of Influencer Games ourselves, Gamely will be open for other game makers to extend, build and publish their games as well. This opens up the door for cross vendor data amalgamation. As a change maker, imagine the ability to mine similar type of data (e.g. quit smoking or weight loss related data) from multiple apps and vendors.
Risks: Though Enterprise gamification is well understood, with companies like lithium Technologies reporting 90% success in influencing group behavior for their enterprise clients, our proposed approach of on-demand game generation and the efficacy of Influencer games need to be field tested, fine-tuned and validated. Risks include (a) testing the usage of Q&A type data that as the common foundation for Influencer games, (b) development of the Game Definition Language that decouples the gamification logic from game data, (c) making of Gamely, the game maker API and wizard that allows auto generation of Influencer games, (d) field testing Gamely and the portfolio the Influencer games it generates, (e) testing, tuning and validating the gamification strategy for the Influencer games to maximize effective behavior outcome, (f) building big data crunching mechanism to generate near real time game stats at scale, and (g) development and training of the non-judgemental AI mentor. And we need funding for these steps.
Scale: Gamely is supposed to do to gaming data of Influencer games what HTML has done for documents. Gamely, once executed, can form the foundation for a very scalable business and make a huge impact in capturing a sizable portion of the Gamification opportunity, especially in the Healthcare and Wellness domains. Though our primary focus is Healthcare and Wellness domains, there is no limitation to the application domains. In fact, the initial portfolio of games includes a number of games targeting influencing kids and youths in schools and niche communities adopt a healthy life style. The Gamely Game Maker Platform and each Influencer Game opens a number of revenue models. Channels of revenue include (a) licensing Gamely to game makers and change agents, (b) licensing of Games, (c) hyper contextual ads from sponsors.
Competitive landscape: Here are a number of players in the healthcare and wellness gamification space: Akili Interactive labs, Inc., Ayogo Health, Inc., Badgeville Inc., , BigDoor Inc., , Bunchball, Cisco Systems Inc., EveryMove, Inc., Fitbit, Inc., Gigya Inc., Hubbub Health, Inc., JawBone, Knewton, Kuato Studios, Lithium Technologies Inc., Mango Health, Microsoft Corporation, Nike, Inc., Rally Health, Inc., Reflexion Health, Inc., SAP SE, SupperBetter, LLC, Welltok, Inc. Just to illustrate our value proposition, each of these vendors have their own ways of treating even something as trivial as the users weight, let alone more complex data like eating habits, level of fitness etc. It’s akin to the pre-HTML days of document handling when each vendor handled document (content and style) in their own ways. Gamely is striving to achieve interoperability through the the separation of gaming data from gamification strategy the same way that HTML achieved interoperability of documents through the separation of content and style. And we all know what a tremendous impact that have in our lives.
Where we stand today: To date, we have formed the core team, completed ideation and early validation, scoped the pilot and filed an IP provisional patent. In our team, we have two industry experts in serious game and gamification behavior, one MMPG architect, a world class design thinker and product maker and a veteran internet legal expert. We’ve active leads in and some very encouraging feedback from local schools, Public Health Departments of UMD, and Johns Hopkins, FDA, Public Policy Research Center (PPRC) and BRAC, world’s largest Non-profit, both head quartered in Bangladesh. Sales leads for pilot have been identified and engaged. We are currently seeking seed funding for (a) rapid prototyping, (b) second round of validation, (c) MVP development, (d) Pilot, (e) IP protection and (e) gamification model validation. Gamely will empower a new generation of change makers, social workers, Public Health change agents, policy makers and educators who are in the business of influencing to attain effective behavior outcome. The Influencer games will help a new generation of end users adopt good habits and shun bad ones in a way that is much more enjoyable and effective than the ones used by their predecessors.
What is Gamely?
How does it work?
- Step-by-Step
- The Game Maker UX
- The Games Portfolio
- Game UX
- The Dashboards
Real-Win-Worth It
- Real/Empathy/Expressed-Latent-Unmet Needs
- Win/Innovation/Opportunity
- Worth it/Business Model/Sustainability
- Design for Environment
Team
- Adil Faisal
- Kazi Naim Rashid
- Dr. Michael Wu
Next
- Seed funding ($250,000 for 25% equity)
- Design Think User Survey
- Pilot
- Refine Scoping based on User Survey
- UI/UX
- Development
- Cloud Hosting
- Market Analysis- Public Health, Education, Enterprise, Wellness, Fitness.
- Business Model Validation. Models to be tested:
- Ad driven
- Enterprise
- Public Service
- Apply for NSF Fund
- Non-provisional Patent Filing
- Microsite for Gamely
- Game portfolio with 5 games
Pilot: Where are we now?
- Team formed
- Provisional patent filed
- Real-Win-Worth It validation in progress
- Pilot scoped
- Exec summary validated by NSF Program Director, UM PH Faculty, Think Tank
- Pilot partners
- Dr. Zillur Rahman
- Dr. Haider Choudhury
- Dr. Humayun Kabir Choudhury
News
References
Downloads
- Exec summary
- NSF Application
- Patent Application
- Pilot Summary