Developing a gamified mobile app to deliver healthspan interventions

A number of lifestyle interventions have been shown to improve the healthspan of older individuals, bethey diet, exercise or cognitive-related, but motivating target populations to introduce these to their daily routine has proved a challenge. The proposed project aims to develop a user-friendly, mobile application for the elderly (>60 year old) population in both Malaysia and the UK, to motivate them to adopt evidence-based lifestyle interventions to promote healthy ageing across cultures. The application development will involve the creation of a variety of tasks, categorised between cognitive, exercise, and nutritional-related, which are tailored to individuals’ needs and risk-profiles assessed during an initial screening procedure (i.e. via a questionnaire in profile creation). This information will enable the research team to allocate specific tasks to participants automatically which will provide the greatest benefit, while minimising any risk, to optimise the impact on their personal healthy ageing journey. The application will be developed through a co-design process with elderly populations in both countries, and will undergo separate prototyping and testing phase to ensure its utility in these cohorts. Ultimately the application will be launched in intervention-communities already established by the research team where health outcomes such as physical and cognitive capacity are regularly assessed, which will be tracked relative to the use of the application. The overall aim will be to provide motivational behaviour change to adopt individually tailored-healthy lifestyles to improve the quality of life and reduce the burden on local healthcare systems while also providing reliable and high-resolution data for such interventions. This presentation will introduce the plans for the project, and seek any feedback on the development of the project from SAAgeNet experts.