AHPC winners
The
American Horsepower Challenge, sponsored by
The Humana Foundation, kicked off the second heat of the competition on Nov.16. 1,465 middle school students are participating in the challenge running from Nov. 16 – Dec. 11, 2009, and Jan. 11 – Feb. 5, 2010. The Humana Foundation will once again award grant monies for school wellness activities or services to the top five schools with the highest average step count. The competition is designed to show participants how easily physical activity can be worked into their daily schedules.
Hula hoop contest
Students in 61 middle schools from Pennsylvania, Michigan, California, South Dakota, Florida, Montana, Oregon, Iowa, Illinois, Kentucky, Arizona, Arkansas, Virginia and Louisiana will be wearing a pedometer, which automatically uploads steps into an online game.
AHPC winning schools
The following Pennsylvania middle schools won the first challenge of the competition that ended May 29:
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Midland
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Deer Lakes
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Franklin Regional
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Hopewell Memorial
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Beaver Falls
A ceremony acknowledging these schools and participating students was held on Oct. 26 in Beaver Falls, Pa. The Humana Foundation presented each school with a check representing their portion of the grant. State Rep. Jason Altmire attended the event, congratulating the students for placing first ahead of 19 other congressional districts.
AHPC award ceremony
The winning schools walked 14.8 million steps or 5,637 miles. This is the equivalent of burning 253,000 calories or 873 slices of pepperoni pizza. This is also the equivalent of walking from Philadelphia, Pa., to Austin, Texas, two times!
Congratulations to all schools who participated in the spring challenge and best of luck to every student logging steps to compete in the fall and winter heats of The American Horsepower Challenge!
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DISCLAIMER ALERT: The ideas expressed in this post came out of my own head, were researched by my own eyes and were expressed by my own hands. They are not intended to serve as medical advice in any way, shape or form. And they do not reflect the views of Humana Inc. or any of its subsidiaries. I take full responsibility if you think this post is awesome or not awesome.
Can your stairs play Chopin? There are some in Sweden that can. German Car Manufacturer Volkswagen recently created an artistic installation at a subway station in Stockholm designed to change people’s behaviors regarding the use of the staircase. They noticed that almost no one chose to walk up the stairs when the escalator was operating right next to it. At some point they decided that the only way they could engage people in the laborious task of walking up the stairs was to make it fun. Walking up regular stairs isn’t the most enjoyable thing in the world, but many people love to make music. So Volkswagen decided to see if they could combine the love of making music with the task of climbing stairs in order to motivate more people to elect to use the stairs. They call it “the theory of fun.”
When people found they could make piano noises by stepping on the stairs nearly 66% more people than normal chose to take the staircase rather than riding the escalator. The very entertaining video (embedded below) now has nearly two million views.
Volkswagen did two things really well here. First, they hit upon what we have been trying to do in the innovation center for years now: Create behavioral change geared towards living better by making fun things healthy. We’ve tried it with Horsepower Challenge, with Freewheelin, with the OPS challenge and our office prototypes, all very successful and ongoing initiatives with wide reach. Volkswagen seems to have done it too.
The second thing they did well was they made it easy to share the message of the fun theory. They made an enjoyable video about their creative effort, put it on YouTube and created a microsite called thefuntheory.com, where users can share the content they find and even enter a contest to win prizes for their own fun theory ideas. I would call their campaign a social media success.
It doesn’t stop with staircases for Volkswagen. They released a second video recently introducing a product aimed at stemming the tide of litter. They hacked a normal city garbage can to make an (almost) endless falling noise when you dropped something inside. It helped people imagine the bin was a bottomless trashcan, and Volkswagen captured some great footage of people hunting around for litter to put into the receptacle.
Finally, there is a teaser for a third product called the bottle bank arcade machine. The details are scant but I imagine they’ve found a way to make recycling even more fun than it already is. The lure of regular content is another social media plus on the Volkswagen scorecard. They already have over two thousand subscribers on YouTube.
All of their videos can be found on thefuntheory.com or their YouTube channel. Check it out. Maybe you’ll be inspired to take something good and make it even better.
Humana and Crumple It Up are in no way affiliated with Volkswagen or thefuntheory.com.
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DISCLAIMER ALERT: The ideas expressed in this post came out of my own head, were researched by my own eyes and were expressed by my own hands. They are not intended to serve as medical advice in any way, shape or form. And they do not reflect the views of Humana Inc. or any of its subsidiaries. I take full responsibility if you think this post is awesome or not awesome.
Twitter is quickly becoming a buzzword with many permutations. Suffixes, prefixes, and infixes give the denizens of the twittersphere (see what I did there) a new vocab mash-up opportunity the likes of which haven’t been seen since Blog was added to the Oxford English Dictionary. But more than just buzzing words, Twitter has quickly become the chosen method of communication for social media mavens world-wide, including people interested in health care. When I first heard about Twitter I thought, "Well that seems like a waste of time. Why would I spend my hours sending out status updates when I could just blog?" The fact is people didn’t really want to read my blog. It was generally too long and too hard to find. What Twitter offered me was a way to connect to people in short bites of information that others actually subscribed to. Because that’s what a twitter ‘follow’ is–a subscription to your words. And there is no easier way to get people to start listening to you despite ever decreasing attention spans. But speaking out is only a fraction of Twitter’s functionality.
Twitter thrives because it enables its users penchant for link-love. The service puts tools in place that allow you to share and share alike, in line with the Creative Commons mantra. When I post something interesting, my followers will re-tweet it to their friends and eventually someone might blog about it. In the gradients of media, with television news still at the top, Twitter remains a bottom feeder, but unlike archaic news channels of the past (sending in submissions via mail or phoning the paper) Twitter is a massively populated, rapid news-sharing medium. Tweets turn into blogs which turn into interviews which feeds into traditional journalism. When the US Airways jet crashed into the Hudson this past week, Twitter was abuzz before anything hit the NY Times homepage or CNN. In the hours following the crash, CNN correspondents started to gather photos and videos taken from tweets via cellphones equipped with cameras. The service has since passed Digg in popularity. Citizen journalists have enhanced the news from the attacks in India to the crisis in Gaza. Twitter is more than a chance to post photos of your cat (no matter how genuine that makes you feel), it is a powerful, wonderfully social communication tool.
But what does this mean for health innovators? On my twitter stream I follow doctors, health policy experts, medical librarians, health IT developers, insurance agents, nurses, and scientists. When I have a health related question, I can usually get an answer in five minutes or less. When I want to learn something new, I can generally discover someone willing to be interviewed. When we do something great, we have friends to talk about it with. But more significant than all this is my ability to keep abreast of the latest developments in science, technology, and health care through the constant flow of updates. Twitter allows me to synthesize information in a whole new way: through the help of others, hundreds of times a day. Then, when I feel I’ve learned and thought and questioned enough to take action, I can start to rally people to me by asking everyone to meet up and enact a bit of change. It all starts with a message, 140 characters at a time.
So join our conversation. Many Innovation Center associates are already there. Start an account at www.twitter.com and follow our tweets. We’ll be sure to follow you back.
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DISCLAIMER ALERT: The ideas expressed in this post came out of my own head, were researched by my own eyes and were expressed by my own hands. They are not intended to serve as medical advice in any way, shape or form. And they do not reflect the views of Humana Inc. or any of its subsidiaries. I take full responsibility if you think this post is awesome or not awesome.
A couple months ago I went to the Health 2.0 conference in San Francisco. While I generally find these sorts of events to be worth only the new technologies you find, I was particularly disappointed by the presentations and the tone of the event. Generally web 2.0 is acknowledged to be a collection of technologies that turn consumers into producers and connect people for conversation. The conference was really just a compilation of electronic medical records companies and web enabled medical tracking in some form.
While I suppose electronic medical records will potentially result in some phantom savings, they are hardly anything that should be considered Web 2.0. So far, my favorite example of Web 2.0 and health is Crossfit, a community of niche fitness aficionados. This is a great example of communicating, sharing and pushing each person to newer and higher goals. Affiliates and members post videos of exercises, of personal records and different methods for laddering to higher results.
Interestingly they have made community a part of their business model. Not only are there companion sites, againfaster.com is an example, but to be an affiliated gym you need not only certified trainers, but you also need to have a community website. So, as Crossfit grows, so does their online community.
Take a look. This is the sort of stuff that is health 2.0, not an EMR.
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DISCLAIMER ALERT: The ideas expressed in this post came out of my own head, were researched by my own eyes and were expressed by my own hands. They are not intended to serve as medical advice in any way, shape or form. And they do not reflect the views of Humana Inc. or any of its subsidiaries. I take full responsibility if you think this post is awesome or not awesome.
