The Gululu Interactive Bottle uses advanced techonology and gamified content to ensure your child is healthy and hydrated.
According to Wikipedia, Gamification is “the application of game-design elements and game principles in non-game contexts.” It's kind of like the games you probably played in your head as a kid where you'd task yourself with cleaning your room in under five minutes, or doing the dishes as quickly as possible, and then you’d get to have dessert. Basically, you complete a task, you get a reward.
Applications like Fitocracy and QUENTIQ use gamification to encourage their users to exercise more effectively and improve their overall health. Users are awarded varying numbers of points for activities they perform in their workouts and gain levels based on points collected. Users can also complete quests (sets of related activities) and gain achievement badges for fitness milestones.
A review of over 100 health apps in the apple app store reveal a positive correlation between gamification elements and high user ratings.
To understand how gamification works we need a basic understanding of what happens in the brain when you're motivated. That means we'll need to talk about dopamine, which is the chemical signal that gets passed from one neuron to the next. We won't go into it too deeply here, but the basic premise is simple: your body releases dopamine when you experience pleasure. This pleasure includes all kinds of things, including rewards.
While the concept of gamification may be simple, effectively gamifying a concept is not. To understand how the Gululu interactive bottle uses gamification to enhance hydration, you can simply follow our five-step process:
1. A key factor that determines the success is an understanding of who the user is. Our users are children between four and nine years old, specifically those who may be underhydrated. (study conducted by Harvard University)..
2. We should have goals for kids to achieve while drinking water. Drinking goals are defined according to children’s weight and lifestyle.
3. Stages and milestones are powerful tools that enable children to complete the drinking goals. Each pet has three growing stages, which count as central milestones in the game. We also have interval goals that differ every two hours, and everyday.
4. Once the milestones have been identified, we prepare the animation resources.
5. Game mechanics can be classified as self-elements and social-elements. Self-elements include pets’ growing stages and the amount of droplets and plants. Social-elements include social game triggering by shaking the bottle and shared drinking habit scores, with higher rankings rising to the top.
References:
Huang, Wendy; Soman, Dilip (December 10, 2013). A Practitioner’s Guide To Gamification Of Education
http://www.rotman.utoronto.ca/-/media/files/programs-and-areas/behavioural-economics/guidegamificationeducationdec2013.pdf
Klosowski, Thorin. "The Psychology of Gamification: Can Apps Keep You Motivated?" Lifehacker. 2014. Web. 23 May 2016.
http://lifehacker.com/the-psychology-of-gamification-can-apps-keep-you-motiv-1521754385
Miller, Tessa. "How to Harness Your Brain's Dopamine Supply and Increase Motivation." Lifehacker. 2014. Web. 23 May 2016.
http://lifehacker.com/how-to-harnass-your-brains-dopamine-supply-and-increas-1496989326
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamification
