What's Your Digital iQ

Our first experiment Circuit, created by iQ back in June of 2010, was developed to make everyday interactions better. Because 15 minutes in the exam room is never enough time to treat and manage a chronic illness, physicians need to understand the patient’s daily journey. Circuit helped with this by utilizing the iPad’s accelerometer to do simple range of motion tests like moving a ball over a mountain to test relative dexterity. Tests like this, would be uploaded to a detailed dashboard that patients can view, share with their physician, or append to their electronic medical record.

Since developing Circuit, we’ve been following health related apps and games to see how we could enhance Circuit. Today we’re most interested in Microsoft’s Kinect PlayFit, a new dashboard that tracks fitness activity on the Xbox. Kinect PlayFit’s aggregation of data from games like Dance Central 2, Your Shape Fitness Evolved 2012, Kinect Star Wars, and others is used to provide personal fitness stats. This service allows players to earn achievements, gamerscores, and avatar awards.

As we looked into the Kinect PlayFit, we we’re excited to see their use of stats like calories burned and daily streak. We quickly started to see how these stats could be applied and modified to manage chronic illness. For instance, say a patient’s disease state affects their flexibility, the Kinect could be used to record their flexibility baseline. Each day, patients could try to match or beat this baseline in a game. During game play, data could be captured showing the retention or improvement of their flexibility over time. Achievements could be awarded for retention, improvement, and daily streaks. Buddy scores could be shown to motivate patients to retain or improve their flexibility.

So we asked, why can’t brands create their own Kinect game to help patients retain and even improve motor skills affected by their disease state?

Our latest prototype Circuit 2.0 contains our thoughts on how brands could do just that.