Congrats on launching! As someone whose parents have been increasingly having eye issues in the past few years, this is a godsend. So excited to see how the product continues to develop!
This is great, guys! I have IBS, and there's always been a lack of research-backed options for alleviating symptoms besides the low-FODMAP diet. I actually have a friend who has tried this program and has had tremendous results, and it's cool to see that there's another app for broader purposes. Wishing you guys luck!
Hmm... I'm seeing that it links to mailto:support@mightyhealth.com - are you referring to the "Contact Us" at the very bottom of www.mightyhealth.com/gift, or somewhere else?
Coaches interact with the members every day. The vast majority of our coaching touchpoints are asynchronous -- either checking in or replying to members via SMS, or configuring member's daily plan (step goals, exercise videos, lessons, etc.). As you can imagine, we've spent quite a bit of time building out tooling on our back end to scale the coach to member ratio while still being able to provide personalized, human service.
Wow, thank you for sharing your personal experience and such a thoughtful response. We'll definitely take your concerns into account as we continue to improve the product.
100% agreed that the underlying issue is not knowing what to do, but rather more psychological aspects such as who you spend time with, environmental factors, self-esteem, and discipline. Our medical co-founder Dr. Chang is a psychologist by training and constantly emphasizes this. One direction I'd personally like to see our product go in is increasing our sense of community and what it means to be "Mighty." Much like the strong online community you see from apps like Peloton and Strava, but with more of an angle of shared physical and emotional self-care. As you mentioned, this is not necessarily a technological solution, but rather one of how we create the right culture and environment for our members to succeed.
That's a great question. We're definitely seeing a large shift toward the consumerization of healthcare in the US -- especially starting with product/services that folks are already accustomed to paying out of pocket for (i.e. therapy, home testing kits, meditation, certain drugs). Similarly, Mighty Health is meant to be aligned with services like personal trainers, nutritionists, and gyms.
Yes, we only focus on people over 50! It's in the sub-headline of our site, but we could make it a lot more prominent / repeated throughout -- thanks for the feedback. All of the exercises in our app are specifically designed for that age range. Looking forward to hearing what your mom thinks of our program!
Yes, absolutely! At the start of the program, we ask about nutritional preferences / restrictions, and the coach can also hop on a call to clarify anything.
Thanks! Great question. Our coaches are trained to help members develop habits (using a framework similar to Atomic Habits or The Power of Habit) -- to successfully create or replace a habit, you need a trigger, the routine (in our case, the workout or eating well), and a reward. At first, the coach's SMS prompts serve as the trigger, but over time we help members establish their own triggers in their environment (post it notes around the house, associating a workout with finishing a specific meal). Similarly, the coach is at first the reward (insight on your meals, shoutouts in your support group) but members learn to embrace other intrinsic rewards like the great feeling of accomplishment you have at the end of a well balanced day.
Yes, that's a great idea. Live video would have even more of a community feel--plus, we could probably capture and edit the streams into re-usable workouts for the future.
We'd love to integrate with provider medical records in the future, but sadly there are very few incentives in a fee-for-service environment. For now, members can just check things off or "postpone" if our cadence is off.
Thanks! We've been working hard on developing our new workout videos, especially since everyone's been stuck at home with little to no equipment recently. Soup can curls look a little funky, but are still effective!
Thanks for the idea! Definitely something to consider for the future, though we'll need to bring on a few experts to develop the content and pathways first. We've seen online solutions like https://donefirst.com/ but that seems like a more pharmaceutical approach.
Our older users have been much more tech-savvy than we anticipated when we first started working on this. Roughly 10k people turn 65 each day, and many of them are in the generation that is used to relying on an iPad every day. That said, we've tried to incorporate tiny UX considerations wherever we can, such as adapting with the phone's text size settings and increasing the size of touch targets.
We've also found that folks are generally overconfident but misinformed about nutrition (probably due to the overwhelming amount of information online and in the media) but anxious and risk-averse when it comes to trying new forms of exercise.
Agreed! It's such a struggle encouraging people to take preventative health seriously, even as chronic issues start creeping in. Rising insurance deductibles in the US certainly don't help as well. We've found that the members who are must successful are those who have received some kind of "warning" from their doctor -- "if you don't lose the weight, you're going to need back surgery" -- or worse yet, people like my dad who had a near brush with death before realizing he needed to take his health into his own hands.
We have a couple of trainers that have focused on older clients exclusively (for example, one of our lead trainers Julie Diamond: https://www.instagram.com/juliediamondfitness/), and all of the rest have had extensive experience training clients up to their 70s. In addition to making sure the workouts are tailored to health goals and easy on the joints, we ask that our trainers offer lots of modifications in the workout videos for those who can't do specific exercises due to joint/back pain.
Thanks for the great feedback. We started with text as it seems more integrated with daily life than in-app chat, but we'd love to expand out channels in the near future. Would love to hear what method you'd prefer instead so I can pass it along to the team!
So true -- deductibles are getting higher every year, and my parents are always facing hard decisions on whether or not they should go in for elective visits. Excited to hear your mom's feedback!
Thanks for sharing! We've definitely seen a bit of the same. The economic gap leads to an access to care gap, especially in more rural areas. That's before even factoring in lack of access to fresh, non-processed foods, which is a key part of nutrition especially at an older age. We hope that services like ours (and your much-needed T2D concept) can help close that gap!