Re-Mission, Hopelab

Denver: I guess rigorous research has been one of the hallmarks of HopeLab, and it really started at a very beginning with that game. What impact did it have in getting children to take their medication as prescribed? Margaret: Dr. Steve Cole, who is the Vice President of Research & Development and really created all of the science platform for HopeLab, worked on this and got several studies in place. And basically what the study showed was a couple of things: that kids were much more likely to take their medications, to take their full course of chemo and the antibiotics, and have better outcomes. And so while you can’t specifically attribute lives saved, you can extrapolate out and show that this game actually saved lives. Getting kids through their full course of chemo and antibiotics resulted in them having much better outcomes through cancer. The other thing that they did, which was very unique, was to do fMRI studies– brain imaging studies– that actually showed that while playing the game, motivational centers were triggered and fired in these kids. We could show that this game was doing what we had hoped it would do, which is to really get these kids activated and motivated and really working too against their disease. Denver: Oh, wow. So there’s actually psychological, physiological, and neurological changes taking place as a result of playing this game. Margaret: Yes. We saw those correlations during the game play. Denver: Well, HopeLab went on into a considerably larger cohort in Step 2 than children with cancer. That was focused on the young people who don’t get enough physical activity and all those associated problems you alluded to just a moment ago. That game was called Zamzee. Tell us about Zamzee. Margaret: Zamzee, as you point out, was an effort to try to take the learnings from Re-Mission. And when I say that, I think the way I would describe it is: in Re-Mission, what HopeLab sought to do was to understand the psychology of behavior change– so what was going on psychologically with these kids that was keeping them from doing what we wanted them do, from taking the medications? And once we understood that psychology, then an experience could be engineered to help reverse that, or create a different opportunity for them. And to this idea, this recipe that HopeLab was using– what we called sort of reverse engineering health. So, it’s first understanding the psychology, and then thinking about an experience that would act in the way that we wanted it to, and then creating a technology or an experience that would help people have that… make that change.