How Blockchain Rewards for Wellness Work
1. Bowhead Health
Bowhead Health allows users to work towards broad wellness goals through inputs including self-reported health surveys, activity levels, and healthy behavior trackers. Users can log their water consumption, stool, sleep, and energy levels using the trackers. The platform allows users to monitor progress while receiving badges for actions. Activity is an incentive through Bowhead’s native coin AHT (anonymous health tokens), granted to users for setting and accomplishing wellness goals. Users can also share their data with health practitioners through smart contracts or lease their data securely to researchers or health companies in exchange for AHT. The company has plans to eventually implement at-home testing kits, nutritional supplements, and practitioner chat functionality. Bowhead also plans to integrate its blockchain health data management system with hospitals and clinics to improve the efficiency of data sharing.
2. Sweatcoin
Sweatcoin is a step-tracking app that stands out from predecessors by incentivizing users to walk more. The app rewards users in exchange for achieving more and more steps with their in-app currency also called Sweatcoin. Sweatcoin can be used to purchase fabulous prizes encouraging users to reach their fitness goals, such as Fitbits, fitness gear, and gym classes. The app doesn’t sync with other fitness trackers; it relies on the phone’s step-count tracker and GPS. Also, it only counts outdoor steps, so users are encouraged to go outside and move around. The company hopes to turn Sweatcoin into a cryptocurrency eventually.
3. wHealth
wHealth encourages users to own their health data and directly benefit from its value. Users are offered the option to opt-in to wHealth’s Health Commons, an anonymized and aggregated data set. Access to the standard data store is sold to approved health institutions, and individuals are rewarded accordingly for their input with the in-app WLTH tokens. Additionally, users are encouraged to meet their wellness goals because the app rewards them for achieving certain milestones such as getting adequate sleep or partaking in a new medical research study. Tokens earned on wHealth can be used on in-app products and services, including an array of apps and health institutions participating in the token economy.
4. HealthWizz
HealthWizz is a unified logbook that aggregates and manages users' health data. HealthWizz stands out from competitors because it can sync and store data with most fitness trackers, medical records, lab testing, and physician visits. Users own their data and are offered the opportunity to sell it to any medical professionals or trainers that they work with. Users can also sell their data anonymously to healthcare companies. HealthWizz also offers sponsored clinical trials that users can opt in to.
5. Lympo.Io
Lympo operates somewhat similarly to Bowhead but with more of a focus on incentivizing people to move instead of broader wellness goals. Users log and track fitness levels in exchange for LYM tokens. The tokens can purchase products and services encouraging fitness and healthy lifestyles. Lympo invites entrepreneurs to use anonymized data stored through their app to create new data-driven companies that will further help users stride toward health and fitness goals. Users are encouraged to spend their tokens to crowdfund the most promising upstarts.
Giving Users Control Over Their Data
For more information about how health and wellness startups are implementing blockchain and why it’s interesting, go to Inc.com:
“Blockchain is full of potential. It promises to flatten hierarchy, dismantle institutions and give people control of their data and decisions. A wave of startups, powered by blockchain, are setting out to revolutionize healthcare as we know it by putting patients at the center of the health journey. The key commonality among these startups is their ability to flip data ownership on its head. By putting this critical component in the hands of users, not institutions, they are able to make healthcare more personalized, responsive, predictive and affordable. And given 52% of smart phone users gather health-related information on their phone, it seems we have the inputs needed for this industry to explode.”
From 5 Startups Using Blockchain To Disrupt Health & Wellness - Inc
Photo Source: WIX
Are there other wellness-based apps employing blockchain that we didn’t write about? Tell us about it!
Written by Yellow Brick Road
August 6th, 2018