On 12 October, top e-health players shared their experience at Tehnopol

We change our behaviour when the pain of staying the same becomes greater than the pain of changing. Change isn´t easy. Changing the way you think means changing what you believe about life. That´s hard. On 12 October the Estonian eHealth Cluster Connected Health called together different players in the eHealth field to discuss behavioural changes in eHealth.

If the global population of diabetics lived in one country, it would be the third largest in the world. Diabetes is the second most expensive chronic disease to treat (after cancer) and sadly, only 10% of patients recover as planned. At the same time, 80% of its cost can be prevented by patients changing their behaviour, and the same applies to the treatment success rate. “According to doctors, patients’ unwillingness to change their behaviour is the main obstacle to achieving clinical outcomes,” said Karolina Korth, business development for digital health solutions at ROCHE Diabetes Care. She underlined that while motivation is what gets us started, habit is what keeps us on a healthy path. Habit refers to subconscious decisions. And some 50% of everyday decisions are made subconsciously. For people to start using new solutions (incl. technological ones) and make it their habit, these must be relatively simple.

Among others who shared their experience was Fredrik Debong from mySugr, currently one of the most successful e-health start-ups worldwide. Of all their employees, 43 in Vienna and 13 in San Diego are diabetics, which means that they have more than enough reason to excel at what they do. They have made it a point to come up with a solution that is as user friendly as possible. Their primary goal is to bring a smile to the faces of diabetics and this is how their logo came to life.

mySugr has 800,000 users globally, being the most popular diabetes app worldwide. Their app has a hugely positive influence on treatment outcomes. At the conference, Fredrik shared his ideas on how technological solutions can help people lead healthier lives by solving “real” problems (a number of those can be found in the field of health), taking into account human psychology (very important) and the need to design a solution that makes users feel that they get individual attention. All new mySugr customers receive a personal e-mail from Fredrik.

Jesper Ohnemus, senior vice president of strategic business development for Dacadoo, shared his experience on how to motivate people to develop new, healthier behaviours. The app calculates an individual’s health score on the basis of more than a hundred indicators. To this end, data from the majority of wearables popular worldwide has been integrated into the app.

Polish start-up Sidly-Care shared their experience on engaging the elderly – they have been quite successful in doing this with their smart watch and app. Currently, Sidly-Care has a couple of thousand users. With their solution they seek to make this hi-tech and highly precise health/prevention app easily accessible and available for as many as possible. To keep users constantly engaged, they hold many competitions and games as well as make it possible to get friends, colleagues, family members and others involved. What is more, for competition purposes their app includes a lie detector. They realised that in order to get people to participate in a competition, the award must be attractive enough, but not too attractive, because this contributes to cheating among users.

Dr. Doron Friedman, senior lecturer at the Sammy Ofer School of Communications, Israel, presented his exciting vision for harnessing the potential of virtual reality to improve people’s health-related behaviour.

During the event, participants had the opportunity to receive feedback on their solutions and come up with new ways for improving user engagement and outcomes.

The seminar was organised by the Connected Health Cluster managed by Tallinn Science Park Tehnopol. We would like to thank our cooperation partners Tallinn University and Tallinn Entrepreneurship Agency.

On 7 and 8 November, Dustin di Tommaso will hold a seminar on the same subject for our start-ups.