HumLife360 & Diabetes Type 2
Diabetes Type 2 patients need motivation to maintain a reasonably consistent regimen of diet and exercise across the duration of their entire life. Not surprising, it’s incredibly hard to do!
However, it is also true that successful long term management of Diabetes Type 2 requires exactly that – reasonably consistent exercise and appropriate diet for the life of the patient.
HumLife360 has developed a solution and a platform that smartly nudges a Diabetes Type 2 patient to do that one thing today in terms of diet, exercise and lifestyle, that they did not do yesterday. And keeps them motivated to do so, one day at a time, for the rest of their life. This will complement the patient’s existing medication regimen and is designed to be an indispensable protocol in measuring and monitoring compliance.
In the next 5 years, 477 M patients world wide, alongside their medication regimen, will try to follow a Diabetes appropriate diet and exercise regimen to prevent long term effects like blindness, amputation, kidney disease and even death.
88M of these patients will be in India.
We can help more than 20M patients in a market worth more than $2B
How HumLife360 works
We deliver deeply individualised smart lifestyle actionable choices. Actions that will essentially ensure that Blood Sugars to kept within reasonable limits. We call these the Best Balance Path.
The customer picks one or two from the actionable choices we present – to do for a few weeks at a time. Once the customer has agreed to do certain actions from our Best Balance Path, our HL360 Friends (Coaches) and other tools simply make sure the customer is kept motivated to follow the choices they have made.
The empathetic nudges delivered by our HL360 friends combined with empowering the customer, work seamlessly to deliver a nonintrusive, subtle, but firm and effective motivation. Along with motivation we are also fully equipped to provide professional grade Awareness/ Education for Diabetes lifestyle.
Where necessary, our Coaches can personally visit customers individually or in group settings within cities. The modularity of our solution components and delivery protocols allows us to cater to a wide variety of populations. Our platform is equally effective addressing the needs of the hyper-modern globe-trotting executive as it is with unsophisticated rural communities.
Customer Journey
The primary components of the program are a mobile app, optional home-based gamified motivational devices, the HL360 Friend coaching services and the involvement of friends and family.
Having said that, what the platform actually delivers is a Best Balance Path (BBP). The BBP is simply but a set of actionable choices that the system presents to the patient. An actional choice is an action pertaining to a change in diet, exercise, activity and/or lifestyle of the customer for a short period of time, usually 2-4 weeks. The system determines these choices from the information it already has about the customer’s physiology, behavior and lifestyle.
The system presents choices that are most likely to be accepted because they are designed to fit seamlessly or almost seamlessly into the daily life of the customer.
The patient is asked to pick one of the presented actionable choices. They are then asked to perform that activity for about 2-4 weeks. During this period, the HumLife360 algorithms figure how best to keep the customer motivated to comply with the choices they have made. The HumLife360 Friends also use the same stimulating factors to keep the customer motivated and if the customer uses the HL360GO! device at home or office, the device will also aid in keeping the customer motivated to adhere to the choices they have made for that specific period of time.
Finally, if one set of actionable options works for the patient, they are encouraged to repeat that behaviour. If not, other behavioural choices are presented. This is repeated till an equilibrium is reached between the what that patient can do, they like to do and actually do for a period of time. When circumstances of their life change, the options change along with them. Hence, the patient is always kept reasonably compliant with the diet and exercise choices they have made and have agreed to follow.
HumLife360 Success Factors
Evidence Based: The Transtheoretical Model (Prochaska & DiClemente, 1983; Prochaska, DiClemente, & Norcross, 1992) is an integrative, biopsychosocial model to conceptualise the process of intentional behaviour change. Whereas other models of behaviour change focus exclusively on certain dimensions of change (e.g. theories focusing mainly on social or biological influences), the TTM seeks to include and integrate key constructs from other theories into a comprehensive theory of change that can be applied to a variety of behaviours, populations, and other parameters. HumLife360 plugged in parameters that apply to the circumstances of the customers lifestyle, their particular ethnicity and their very individual, deep notions of what a reasonably successful life means to them.
We combined the learnings from the evidence-based model with our real life findings. That gave rise to the unique and proprietary HL360 Behaviour Change Framework (HL360BCF). Using this Framework, we are able to understand what really works for the customer. And we are able to understand it faster, better and in a away that ensures our understanding always stays valid through the vagaries of the customers life.
Lifetime Close Understanding: The life of a human being is in a constant state of flux. It’s no different for a person suffering from Diabetes Type 2. If anything, with Diabetes Type 2, the responsibility of maintaining a reasonably consistent lifestyle is an even greater burden. HumLife360 uses the HL360BCF to model the customers proclivities as they pertain to a Diabetes Type 2 lifestyle. Further we use self-learning algorithms to ensure our understanding remains as valid as possible as the customer’s life changes.
Note that our efforts are focused on the data for the individual customer. That will always be our primary focus so that we do not ever loose sight of the unique characteristics of that one particular human being. However, we also run or algorithms of huge amounts of public data and that helps us keep our overall solution with the ranges of typical human behavior.
Simple and Non-Prescriptive: We believe that ‘Friends helping friends’ is a very powerful mantra. Our entire support model is based on this principle. The HumLife360 Friend is a Coach and is extensively trained in Diabetes, Physiology, Nutrition and Exercise, Behavioural Economics, and of course Customer Services. But at core they are not prescriptive, condescending, and advisory. They are truly what they are called – Friends.
Along similar lines, what the HL360 Friends deliver is not prescriptions, advise, orders or even instructions. They deliver nudges. And we get unusually surprising results when we treat customers like normal intelligent people the are and we make them reasonable accountable for their own health.