The Journal of mHealth Vol 1 Issue 2 (Apr 2014) | Seite 41

Interview with Peter Ohnemus at dacadoo
employers monitor the overall general
health and wellbeing of the employees,
using a quantifiable method of analysis,
they can also begin to extract meaningful insights from the data. By incorporating a social aspect then it becomes
engaging for those involved and helps
encourage positive lifestyle management.
Peter describes how this is a phenomena that is becoming widely accepted
across the medical arena. “…If you
look at the healthcare sector generally
there is something called the Hawthorne Effect. Hawthorne was a town
in America where they put 1,500 people
on diets and asked them to share their
daily activity and their daily nutrition
consumption. They then took 1,500
people and told them to do exactly
the same but that they didn’t have to
share with anyone. To keep a long story
short, the ones that had to share what
they were doing, about what they were
eating, where they were walking, etc.
lost the weight three times faster than
the people that were doing the exercise
with no social interaction.”
“You can punish people, you can put
pictures of dead people on tobacco
packages and they will still smoke. If
somebody wants to smoke they will
smoke! If somebody wants to be an
alcoholic then they will be an alcoholic!
I personally believe that you need to
work with happiness and relevance like
the REF factor and then of course also
give people economic incentives.”
This concept of personal motivation is
definitely something that underlies the
dacadoo philosophy. Without an individual wanting to undertake physical
activity or take steps to lead a healthier
lifestyle then there is little chance of
them actually achieving any significant
progress. By integrating health into
everyday life, making it something that
can be fun, rewarding achievement and
encouraging engagement via social
interaction and financial incentive, then
it becomes more likely that an individual will take greater personal respon-

sibility for their own
health and wellbeing.
In order to make the
platform integrate easily with people’s lifestyles the company has
gone to great lengths
to ensure that the system can be used with a
wide variety of