Adriemilly Rigo wasn’t feeling well. “To tell you the truth, I was very sedentary, I didn’t practice sports much, and I didn’t take care of myself very well,” she says.
She had gained weight, felt fatigued and developed chronic migraines. Then her doctor told her she had fatty liver disease, a serious metabolic condition that if left untreated can lead to liver failure.
Rigo was scared. So, when her supervisor asked her if she wanted to try out a new health and wellness app offered by their company, she signed up. After following the healthy meal advice and starting an exercise program, her symptoms are under control, and she is feeling better than she has in ages. “It’s been wonderful for me,” says Rigo. “Now I challenge myself more and more every day.”
Rigo is prioritizing her health with help from a generative AI-powered app called RadarFit. Launched in 2020 by a trio of female entrepreneurs, the Brazilian tech startup has already amassed more than one million users with a unique gamification strategy designed to incentivize healthy habits.
While it serves individuals, too, RadarFit’s focus is providing a comprehensive health and wellness program to corporate customers. “For companies, we solve the problem of high costs from employee health problems and having to invest a lot in health benefits,” says Chief Executive Officer Jade Utsch Filizzola.
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Like many countries experiencing rapid urbanization, Brazil is grappling with high rates of heart disease and metabolic conditions, such as diabetes and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, also known as steatohepatitis. The prevalence of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) in Brazil is estimated to be around 35.3 percent, the highest in Latin America, compared to 25 percent worldwide, according to the Global Burden of Disease database. While costly to treat and potentially deadly, many chronic conditions, including NAFLD, can be prevented – or even reversed – with proper diet and exercise, according to the Journal of Hepatology. That’s one reason why more companies like Rigo’s have signed up for RadarFit. In a few short years RadarFit has enrolled over 60 corporate customers – and is on track to have 80 commercial clients by the end of this year.
Powered by the Microsoft Cloud, RadarFit runs on Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI Service and uses Microsoft Copilot Studio to automate marketing, and analyze data and user feedback.
The impact of RadarFit on the health of employees has “been a big surprise to us,” says Samuel Lopes Fontes, who oversees finance and HR at Cooabriel, Rigo’s employer. Under persistent but friendly prompting from the RadarFit app, says Lopes Fontes, “people who claimed they didn’t have time to go to the gym started exercising and waking up earlier so they can take care of themselves.” In another turnaround, colleagues are asking the company to stock more fresh fruit and vegetables in the employee kitchen.
Two years ago, 27 of Cooabriel’s 470 employees signed up for RadarFit. Now as word has spread, 59 are taking part, and in the first six months of this year, health complaints have fallen by half, says Lopes Fontes.
Prompted by RadarFit’s AI-generated app, Lopes Fontes, who, like Rigo, also developed fatty liver disease (although his was caught much earlier) improved his diet, started running more and says his doctor has since declared his disease in remission.
Of course, there are thousands of apps and websites dishing out health and wellness advice, and many more millions of people who aspire to live healthier lifestyles but fail to follow through.
That’s where gamification comes into play. “The root cause of the difficulty of achieving a healthy life is the lack of immediate results,” says Filizzola. Even if a person puts in 60 minutes of exercise or eats a healthy meal, “they don’t instantly get the health and body they want,” she says. “This lack of immediate reward is what triggers the lack of motivation.”
So RadarFit uses generative AI, combined with a points system, to incentivize healthier choices. Anonymized user data captured from the uploaded images of meals and other activities is used to generate “tags” – or labels – that generate personalized recommendations based on each healthy habit registered by users. An avatar that “learns” from user input recommends meals and physical activity tailored to individual health goals. Points awarded for healthy choices can be exchanged for donations to social or environmental causes or redeemed for products like appliances and electronics.
Different point categories recognize that some tasks are more difficult than others. For example, a 15-minute workout earns 3 points, while a 60-minute or longer workout can be worth 9 points. A healthy meal can earn 31 points, highlighting the importance of healthy eating, while tasks like drinking a glass of water, an important but easier task, earns 5 points.
The RadarFit app also allows users to track their progress compared to colleagues, the kind of friendly competition that research has shown can act as a further spur to action (and is familiar to anyone who has practiced more after comparing their scores to other learners on popular language apps). Users can also opt out of company competitions.
RadarFit Chief Technology Officer Tatiany Duarte, who designed her first video game at age 15, says combining generative AI with gamification turns what could be a dreaded task into something fun and engaging. It “makes it much more playful,” she says.
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