This week our CEO and Founder of TeamSportz, Francisco Baptista, chatted with Co-Hosts Ben Wilkins and Pete Jenkins on their podcast, Health Points. Ben and Pete are always interviewing a range of innovative thinkers, designers, researchers, and business leaders in the gamification and health space - and in this week’s conversation with Francisco, they really get into the TeamSportz platform, how health is gamified, how to create healthy behaviours, and how gamification can be more beneficial in a team setting.
And don’t worry if podcasts aren’t your cup of tea and you’re more of a ‘read the highlights’ type of person, we’ve got you covered! Here’s an overview of the key takeaways of what was discussed on this week’s episode of Health Points.
As Francisco puts it simply, the TeamSportz platform enables coaches to leverage AI to do what coaches do best. Many have the impression that all of these new apps have come into existence to replace people, but that’s not the case with TeamSportz (quite the opposite actually). The thought with TeamSportz is to create a sense of connectedness; to make it feel like players and coaches are never alone and always with their team - wherever, whenever. It’s a tool for coaches to improve interaction with the team, not replace it.
TeamSportz is able to achieve this connected feeling through the use of computer vision and video analysis, for coaches to be able to give players real time feedback (as if they were in a practice together). Also through the Leaderboard, players can see where their teammates stand. Similar to a social app, players on TeamSportz can see if their teammates are online, what exercises they just did, and then Challenge them right then and there. All of these elements contribute to how TeamSportz is gamifying health.
Believe it or not, the concept of Challenging other players in the app came to be out of natural demand for this feature. It comes to no surprise that players are eager to see where their performance stands in relation to other teammates, and with TeamSportz, this is now always available - with the Leaderboard. Players typically strive to be the best and want to get rewarded.
TeamSportz discovered that this ‘reward’ players seek doesn’t necessarily have to be a badge like most of these other sport/fitness apps have in place. Instead, TeamSportz have found that players are more motivated by being given the opportunity to extend an exercise past the given parameters if the app detects their reps, for example, are averaging faster than the expected. It puts players up to a new challenge. To put into context, a player could be doing a series of push ups in a time frame of 1 minute, but if the app detects the player is completing the push ups faster than expected average, the app will extend the time past the minute to push the player to complete more reps. So as you can see, the exercise itself pushes players above and beyond (without the thought of getting a badge at the end).
All of this comes full circle when talking about the marriage of gamification and health and the power it has to push people to become more active. When you’re playing games, you're not necessarily thinking you’re exercising, and overtime this creates healthy habits (in conjunction with other outside elements such as a healthy diet, good night’s sleep, etc).
To close up the conversation, Ben and Francisco discuss the fact that tech generally focuses on practical solutions, and the big gap with tech nowadays is the emotional support element. TeamSportz fills this gap because coaches can use the data provided to them on the app to facilitate better, meaningful conversations with their players. This perfectly demonstrates how data can inform empathy, and more tech solutions out there need to think about this.
That just about sums up this week’s episode of Health Points, but you can listen to it in full on Spotify or Apple Podcasts!
