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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.
So in Zamzee, the idea was really around physical activity. It started with a desire to work on obesity, type 2 diabetes, that whole big area of need. Physical activity was seen as one of the real keys that we could potentially impact. So with physical activity, there was a long process of engaging kids… trying to understand what got them excited about physical activity. With teen girls, it was dancing. With different groups, it was different things. It wasn’t a team sport for everybody. It wasn’t soccer for everybody. So we really needed to think about ways to capture activity among lots of kinds of kids. And then basically, a game was created. Think of it as like a Fitbit or a tracker for kids, combined with what we call an experience or a gaming layer. So they’d have an avatar; their avatar would be given challenges, and they would get points and badges and a variety of things once they had accomplished different things within the game.
So Zamzee, like Re-Mission, was developed with young people… heavy engagement from young people. We call it “young people as the co-designers,” and then we tested it.
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