Episode Transcript
Announcer: Medical news and research from the Ï㽶ÊÓƵ of Utah physicians and specials you can use for a happier and healthier life. You're listening to The Scope.
Interviewer: What do you do with the health app on your smartphone? I'm with Dr. John Langell, Executive Director for the Center for Medical Innovation at Ï㽶ÊÓƵ of Utah Health Care.
John what do you do with these health apps on your smartphone?
Dr. Langell: There are actually a lot of applications that you can put on your smartphone. In fact, there are over 100,000 applications you can put on your smartphone, and they are all tailored for different areas of fitness, nutrition, health and disease management. So you're going to find a wide variety available to you. Your job as a consumer is to figure out which one fits your needs. If you take a typical application like the Apple Health app or My Fitness Pal, the two of which will link with each other and share data, you're going to be looking at the management of your daily activities, your caloric intake, your nutritional components of that intake.
So you get an assessment of, are you eating the right foods, are you meeting your dietary goals? Are you eating too much so that you are going to be gaining weight over time? Or too little so that you become unhealthy? And it links it to your overall exercise performance to give you an idea if you're living a healthy lifestyle and by doing so improves the overall quality of your life and we hope the overall health aspects of your life.
Interviewer: Do you find that these apps work, that people get healthier, and move into those healthier lifestyles and actually lose weight if that's what they want to do by using these?
Dr. Langell: Most studies actually show that they do. But the issue is much like the dietary fads people get excited engaged about things initially. They'll use them, go full force, they get excited about it. They partner with their friends. And in fact if you use apps that link you to your friends, we find that peer pressure drives your performance even higher. But over time like anything, people lose interest. It's no longer engaging. It's no longer new. It's no longer fun and yeah it worked, but I'm kind of bored with it.
So the real key here is how do you apply behavioral sciences to make people want to continue to use this product. It's a problem that goes well beyond this. If you look at video games most players will use a video game for a couple of months, they're excited by it. Then they're ready for the next one.
Interviewer: So what would you recommend to somebody who really truly wants to become healthier and lose weight using one of these apps. What's the best way to go about that?
Dr. Langell: Just remember that the app is a tool. The commitment comes from you internally and it's a change that you need to integrate into your life. Just like the other key areas of your life that you do on a daily basis because they're part and parcel of what makes up your normal day, your routine. You need to be able to put health and fitness and nutrition into your normal routine and use these apps as tools to better understand how impactful you've been. So you can track overall weight loss. Have you attained your goal and when you have how do you maintain it? It's a tool to help you do that.
Are you reaching the recommended exercise goals for you and can you use the apps to identify pieces of information that will help improve your performance or sustain your performance? And if you look at them as tools to help manage things that you've integrated into the routines in your life, that's where they're powerful.
The other plus is a way to connect to other people who can help motivate you who are interested in doing the same thing. And this is a whole new area of app empowerment where your app could randomly connect to somebody that you have no idea who they are. They'll stay de-identified. But they can connect to you and motivate you and you can motivate them. And that's really important in those times where you have major life changes and your routine starts to go away. And when you come back to your routines life you may not be able to return to the things that you had before.
This is a problem we see with, for instance, people in the business world, they travel a lot. Their home routine tends to be set; then they travel, they come back after two or three weeks, and they're trying to re-engage in their life and things like exercise and diet, they tend to fall away.
Interviewer: So are there a couple of apps that you would recommend to somebody who's trying to eat healthier and maybe exercise a little more.
Dr. Langell: The key here is finding one that fits you and your needs the best because every app is different. Every app delivers the information in a different way, has different components, links to other applications. Some of them link to devices like FitBit. And I can't say that there is any one app that's perfect for every individual.
Personally I have used My Fitness Pal. I found that to be really an outstanding program for me and I used that in conjunction with other high-intensity training applications that I use for long distance running and marathon and triathlon training. They sync and link with these other programs and I have recommended My Fitness Pal to my patients because it worked for me.
The problem is, we don't really have great clinical studies to show what truly efficacious and what patient population they're truly efficacious in. So the individual needs to play an experiment and oftentimes that means getting recommendations from friends and people they trust who've already used these applications.
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