When it comes to injury prevention, the slogan “the customer is always right”, can be dangerous, not only for their wellbeing, but for the image of your brand/product. What do you do if the customer wants to do something that increases their risk of injury? Nobody wants to hear “don’t do this”, so how you steer the customer in the right direction? MINDWORKS host Daniel Serfaty talks with Wishroute founder Jessica Lynch, Sparta Science CEO Dr. Phil Wagner, and Aptima’s Marine Corps fitness planner engineer Angelica Smith, to find out.
When it comes to injury prevention, the slogan “the customer is always right”, can be dangerous, not only for their wellbeing, but for the image of your brand/product. What do you do if the customer wants to do something that increases their risk of injury? Nobody wants to hear “don’t do this”, so how you steer the customer in the right direction? MINDWORKS host Daniel Serfaty talks with Wishroute founder Jessica Lynch, Sparta Science CEO Dr. Phil Wagner, and Aptima’s Marine Corps fitness planner engineer Angelica Smith, to find out.
Daniel Serfaty: Angelica, was there something during the performance of this project that suddenly you had like an aha moment, you were going in one direction and by interacting with the Marine Corps, with the Marines themselves, or with what you call the FFIs, the fitness instructors, you realized that they say something, they behave in certain way that prompted you to change the direction of the project?
Angelica Smith: We used to have a capability within mobile to launch a workout for a group of individuals. So you'd have this roster feature, you can kind of say, "Who's in this?" And you can check off all of the participants, and then whoever's leading that course, they can know whoever took, who was there in class and things like that. And so we thought that was a good feature and we thought that would be something they would use and then it turned out that they didn't like the feature, they want the feature. So we actually took the feature out and then it came back around during COVID we needed to put this group feature back in, and folks were working out individually.
But then as things started to kind of go back to normal, these group workouts, they were relevant again. And so without the customer coming back and saying, "We want this group feature." Then I say, "We need to put that feature back. We dropped the ball on it when we took it out." So we did come to the conclusion that even though they didn't want it, they definitely need it, but it was an aha moment. They don't really know what they want or need, we know they need this and we need to put it back.
Daniel Serfaty: Well, it's a bit related. It's this notion that the user know what they want, I think the Steve Jobs famously said, "I'm going to tell the user what they want." And so it happens in our field too, and we should absolutely respect what our users want, but we should also understand what they need. And sometime by a gentle guidance towards from what they want to what they need, this is what will do the best service we can provide to them.
Angelica Smith: During some of my face-to-face meetings and trainings with the Marines, I'd get all sorts of requests for crazy features, "We want to see this." And some of it was kind of gamified, some of it was like leaderboards and things like that. But some of the FFIs did, I think it was the more experienced FFI that had a background in health and fitness. They did have a better sense of what they wanted and what they needed to perform their jobs better and not just do the bare minimum of creating these plans, whether they're effective or not, and then distributing them to the fleet. But then, like I said, you had some other Marines, they just had some super wild wishes of things they wanted to see in the app that just didn't make sense.
Daniel Serfaty: I'm not surprised they wanted to see a leaderboard. This Phil's feels analogy to CrossFit. They want to see who can bench press the highest weights.
Angelica Smith: But that's dangerous. That is very dangerous, if you tried to do that for Marines. So we steered clear of that.
Jessica Lynch: I have an example of that. In our early testing with individuals, we found people had the best success when they had opted in to their daily goals, they had set them of what they were going to do each day. And then as we were working with more individuals, all different fitness levels, we learned that sometimes the step of setting those goals was too much for someone that week. And so we were skipping the check-ins. If you don't set your daily goals, we'll just have you start next week and set new ones.
And we started testing, we'll pre-set the goals. We're still going to check in with you on something and report back on anything you did for your fitness that day. And that actually got people then more motivated to set their goals, but they actually were checking in and responding and engaging. So a little bit of a nudge even when someone doesn't opt in, it's got to be a mix. Still find the best success when then we get someone to take more action and be proactive in setting what they'd like to do, but our own intervention there, has proved quite powerful as well.
Daniel Serfaty: Yes. Thanks for sharing that. I'm going to change a little bit of the topic and Phil, you said something earlier from your own personal experience, as an athlete with injury and fitness, it's not just about maintenance of health. It's also about recovery from injury or even injury prevention. Can you tell us a little more about that? How your system at Sparta helps people both in recovery of injury, but also in prevention?
Phil Wagner: Yeah. Back to the example of identifying habits that could be improved, I mentioned the offensive lineman who squats as part of their sports and then goes and squats as part of their training. That's where data can say, "Okay, well, you shouldn't do that because it increases your risk like this, on the flip side, here's what you should do instead." So no one likes to hear, "Don't do this," and not have an alternative, right? So the data should guide you to, "Hey, this isn't serving you well, here's something else you can do similarly to satisfy that need." Almost a craving, if you will. If someone wants to lift heavy weights, "Don't do this exercise heavy, do this exercise heavy instead." That's really where a technology can feed to identify, but also suggest most importantly, an alternative habit to adopt.
Daniel Serfaty: Have you had, Jess and Angelica in that order, this notion of injury, how do we, after all, we are giving people advice on their health, on their physical health, on their fitness, how do we deal with this whole dimension of they can injure themselves following our advice sometimes or not following it right.
Jessica Lynch: For us in the work we do with individuals and partners, it's about making sure that they are motivated to talk to someone who's a professional and looking at their individual body and injuries and hands on, and looking at many kinds of wearable data and getting in there. And so a lot of us ignore pain and symptoms and so we view our role as not the ones to diagnose and give you that game plan, but how to rehab or what to do, but to motivate you to go talk to someone who you can be in person with and get that more personalized advice, and then we'll help you follow through with that.
Angelica Smith: This is a big challenge, and that's something that we are looking at addressing this whole idea of injury prevention. Within the app, we have opportunities for the Marines who are executing these programs to provide feedback to the creators of these plans, right? You have a creator of plan who has the set of expectations on how effective the plan should be, how difficult the plan is. But then the unit that he's distributing this plan to, they could be at all sorts of levels, beginner level, advanced, and working out and physical physique. And then you have those users who execute these programs and how they feel the plan was, they thought perhaps it was more difficult, more challenging than the creator of the plan. Well, there's a huge gap.
And so we put in place an opportunity for the individual Marine to say, "This plan was a lot more difficult. You said it was a five, it was for sure a 10, And oh, by the way, I got injured by trying to do this plan that should have been a five, but really was a ten." And so the data that we collect, we're hoping it's going to help the FFIs who are the creators of these PT programs, revise plans appropriately. So as a feedback comes in, they can say, "Oh my goodness, out of the 1000 users who launched this program, they thought it was more along the lines of a seven. And we thought it was more along the lines of a five. Let me go ahead and adjust this program for my users." And so we are looking at trying to fill in those gaps and really help prevent injuries.
Daniel Serfaty: Good, good. I think this is an essential part of what we do. So Phil, I'm going to use your physician training. There is a big trend in medicine right now, that we are actually copying in the general training and education market called precision medicine. And precision medicine hypothesis is basically, we're all different, we all have different genomes, literally. And in the future, medicine will be hyper individualized. So somebody who has cancer or who has a heart disease will have a very unique treatment that is totally adapted to their individual makeup.
Obviously we are not at that level, not at the genetic level yet for education and training, but there is a big trend now, precisely because of the availability of large amounts of data, about people and our ability to process it fast as a group and tailor it to have this notion of, "I'm going to give you a prescription," translate here, maybe a fitness program, "That is just for you at that moment in time for what you want and for what your goals are." How close are we to that level of individual treatment? In a sense, Jess, in her technology and her services does that, but with a lot of human intervention in between, how do we do that? Are we close to doing this precision fitness goal?
Phil Wagner: Yeah, I think that the technology is, and a lot of the data sets are there. The key piece is making sure that the data that is or has been collected is good data, that's one of the challenges with a lot of wearables, is you're bringing a lot of data, but how much of it is noise? How can you really sift through and identify what activity was what? So you can create those models of, when someone is at risk and how that risk was reduced. And so I think that data is there right now. Now it's a lot more on the cultural side of things, of how organizations can position it in a mutually beneficial way, because that's kind of this next part that's coming, if it hasn't already, which is, "Okay, all this information is being gathered on me, is that going to be used against me in some way?"
And we're already seeing it, and people forget that that's an issue within the military too. The army is rolling out a new army combat fitness test, and the scores are hidden from most military leadership. And the reason being is, there is a complaint and a fear that the performance on this new test is going to dictate promotions or not. That's the cultural piece that when we get into insights within an organization to keep your organization healthy, that's going to be the next challenge here is, we need to make sure that it's presented shown in a way that, "Hey, this information we're analyzing and providing you as a way to help and not judge your future prospects within the company."
Daniel Serfaty: I think this notion of what do you do with this data, both the data you feed into the system, and the data that is being produced as a result of the recommendation is a huge issue. We're going to explore it a little later in the podcast today. Any comments, Jess or Angelica about this notion of precision fitness, in a sense that everybody having not only their own personal trainer in a box, but also that that trainer will recognize your particular circumstances, medical, or mental, or whatever at that moment in time, are we moving towards there?
Jessica Lynch: I think the whole industry is moving in that direction. And it's really exciting because everyone needs to find what works for them, and there's a lot of ways to be successful. And so tools that open up people's perspective of what a workout can even be and what it looks like and how it feels and something that's going to get them better results than doing what they thought they should do based on some not science-based conception, they read in a magazine. It opens up a lot of opportunity and will help people feel better, because unfortunately, most people don't feel that good, and that's thanks.
Angelica Smith: Yeah. I do think it's a very exciting time for this. I think we are close, I don't think we're that far off. I think this is what executives want, this is what the leadership of USNC, of the army, this is what the military wants. I think they're ready for it, and I think it's going to change the way we train our war fighters and it's going to change our expectations of a war fighter, I think for the better. So it's a very exciting time.