Powering Lasting Behavior Change

A different kind of personalized patient education & engagement

Dialysis Motivation | Cultural Competency | Engagement | Usability | Motivation | Personalization

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MotiSpark is a new kind of digital health tool that sends patients timely, personalized visual nudges to help them practice healthy choices and build intrinsic motivation. 

Existing approaches often trigger shame, resulting in low engagement rates and unimproved outcomes. But, people love using & learning with MotiSpark because it makes them feel hopeful, in control and cared for.

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Reframe not shame

Intrinsic Motivation

Personalized, caring

Self-directed

Personalized support and education for those living with CKD

Supporting people on dialysis to stay motivated and learn how to take care of themselves is part of the MotiSpark origin story. It began with our desire to help family on dialysis who struggled with depression and non-compliance. After a lot of work building and testing a solution, we launched our first pilot with dialysis patients who were part of a Chronic Care Management program. And, the patients and their providers loved the program. Patients who got MotiSpark attended 4x as many of their remote-care appointments, stayed highly engaged in MotiSpark and reported higher satisfaction. Read more here.

MotiSpark enables patients to get timely, personally relevant content that helps them use evidence-based behavioral psychology to stay motivated during their daily lives. Patients are enrolled by a healthcare provider and only need a smartphone or laptop to get 1-5 videos and personalization quizzes per week.

Patients learn self-care much more easily through video while they enjoy the delightful inspiration of personalized content.

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Sample education clips that prompt patient action & content uploads

In English

Nutritional education and prompt for patient upload example

The video above was used as part of the first pilot.

In Spanish

Introductory video is followed by a fun set of questions where people choose things like what they find most meaningful, activities they enjoy, struggles & they upload photos of loved ones and more.

This video about the benefits of stress-reduction on health is followed by personalization questions that then result in relaxing, deligthful video nudges at critical times.

Content via cCBT & personalized coping plans

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Example Sparks

Patients learn & engage in a novel form of cognitive behavioral therapy that also captures their content and preferences. The resulting spark video includes visual priming to help her subconsciously choose healthier foods. See Oxford Published Trial Report on why this works.

Personalizing & uploading content is easy & fun

Personalizing & uploading content is easy & fun

She sees her selfie and personalized imagery - with people in her age group.

Optional Tips & Cheer from Caregivers & Peers

Cultural Competency

A core part of MotiSpark’s mission is to scale culturally competent care to improve outcomes. One key way we do this is by empowering local providers appear in their patient’s motivational videos - and we make it as easy to do as using Instagram. They also get to populate default choices in quizzes, like locally relevant food ideas & exercise programs.

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Existing Interventions:

Demographically insensitive & use outsiders instead of adding value to providers

Struggle to scale to diverse populations
For example, an African American diabetes educator who tried Noom’s diabetes program complained that it used coaches who lacked cultural understanding of her population in a variety of ways. And, the app suggesting food items that aren’t sold in local stores in South Carolina. Notable exception to cultural incompetency is ConsejoSano who have taken great measures to understand and hire people from diverse populations.

MotiSpark:

Demographically relevant & extends value of local, billable providers

Scales local demographically relevant providers & community members
MotiSpark is built to leverage local expert and community voices by enabling them to easily add content to the platform. So the Diabetes educator that tried existing programs like Noom said that MotiSpark was the only program she felt that was built for her community. This Diabetes educator and affiliated Clemson University researchers are now using MotiSpark to address underserved diabetics with a virtual program with funding under the CARES Act. We have a similar pilot in development for Spanish language diabetes support. 

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Engagement

MotiSpark 94% engagement after 3 months of use.
Existing app medium: 0% engagement after 6 days.

Existing digital health apps suffer from very low engagement rates (eg. 2/2020 study showed average engagement across 8 apps of only 5.5 days. ) If a patients don’t use an app, it is not only ineffective, it’s not billable. Notable here is that paid cohort studies that are used in sales have made the problem of engagement difficult to see. For example, Pear Therapeutics reSET trial paid $400 to testers if they sustained engagement for 12 weeks. And, they admit… “the benefit of reSET without the use of contingency management incentives has not been evaluated.” Once out in the real world where patients are not being paid hundreds of dollars, engagement crashes. But, MotiSpark’s very different product shows consistently high engagement without paying patients.

Relevant research:
• Indicators of retention in remote digital health studies: a cross-study evaluation of 100,000 participants
• Readability of Patient Education Materials Available at the Point of Care
• Computer use, language, and literacy in safety net clinic communication
• What Is Form Abandonment and How Can You Avoid It?

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HOW IS MOTISPARK DIFFERENT:

Cultural Competency | Engagement | Usability | Motivation | Personalization

Usability

VISUALS VS TEXT
Competitors require users to read and type in a lot of text.
MotiSpark uses video and visuals, bypassing literacy requirements.

TIMELY VS NOT TIMELY MotiSpark sends nudges when the patient has requested them as relevant to his/or needs or desires. Competitor apps depend on a user’s will. For example, that they will enter their calories after eating or will respond to a text-message telling them they should report their mood.

SMS vs DOWNLOAD APP
Most competitor apps require app downloads. MotiSpark works through SMS or email with any browser. Onboarding is done via provider recommendation that does not take PII. No back-end integration required. Monthly de-identified reports sent.

 
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Compare: anxiety coping strategy reinforcement

MotiSpark

 

MyStrength

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Compare: Healthy eating nudge

MotiSpark

The video above integrates multiple approaches, from visual priming, backward masking to cCBT reinforcement. User sees their selfie videos and photos and is reminded of their personal sense of purpose. Learn more.

 

Noom

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HOW IS MOTISPARK DIFFERENT:

Cultural Competency | Engagement | Usability | Motivation | Personalization

Motivation:
How the app makes people feel about themselves

Qualifying the effect on a patient’s self-perception is not a typical metric. But, to understand why MotiSpark has such a high engagement rate while existing digital health apps have very low ones, it’s worth reflecting on the app’s effects on self-perception.

MotiSpark makes people feel good by designing the experience to:

  • show them they are cared through empathetic video

  • help them feel more control in their lives by giving them choices in their behavioral plans

  • help them practice positive reframing & self-talk and see that they are part of groups of people that are like them. There is no ‘failing’ or red-x’s in MotiSpark.

  • Competitors apps make patients feel like they is something wrong with them and they are often failing. The interfaces may literally show the red-x’s and downward spirals.

Overweight people gain more weight if they wear trackers. 70% of USA is overweight.

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Tracking progress is the central user-experience in all but mindfulness digital health apps. MotiSpark believes the tracking paradigm does not work to help the vast majority of US patients and instead, triggers “what the hell” effect and shame. Trackers are great for reinforcing pride in already activated populations - but terrible for others.

MotiSpark Addiction Recovery

Pear Therapeutics Reset

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Personalization

Existing apps lack personalization: Patients may get personal attention from a coach, but this comes with a premium cost. And, the coaches are often not demographically appropriate.

MotiSpark goes well beyond personalizing by using patient’s first name. By leveraging multiple evidence-based methods to sustain engagement and help people tap into positive reframing, MotiSpark makes it easy & fun to define personal goals, coping strategies and behavioral plans. People can add more to their MotiSpark anytime, but the system is designed to prompt adding personalized elements/learnings roughly 1x/week during sessions that only last a few minutes.

  • Visual multiple choices quizzes that help user identify things like their goals, coping strategies, healthy shelf-stable snacks, at-home exercises

  • User upload personal photos to identify supportive people and practices & enjoy seeing their uploads in their videos in always-new ways

  • User does ‘selfie therapy’ where they record themselves answering open-ended questions & enjoy seeing these videos in novel ways in future videos. Note testing & data show patients of all demographics will do this given proper explanation and privacy assurances. 

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