NeuFit: Improve Your Health in a Role-Playing Game

Will Schmidt Dec 7, 2012 Tweet

NeuFit, a hybrid social networking, video game, and fitness program, offers ways to stay active and build a vested interest in your own personal health by pairing real-life activity with virtual-world success.

The interface is set up like a role-playing game, but real-life data dictates the progress of the characters. Every exercise or activity performed in real life goes toward completing quests and earning rewards. So taking the stairs over the elevator or parking farther away from the office doors will help you level up and get loot. Small changes in daily routines can add up to huge advantages and the harder one works out, the more one earns.

One of the founding team members, Kevin Dorrance, MD, realized one day that a large amount of people were coming into his office asking for a pill to fix their chronic health issues. But for many of these patients, it was too late to help. Borne of the need for a new type of preventative measure, NeuFit helps to increase physical activity while decreasing the risk of obesity and diabetes.

While there are a number of competitors in this field, the NeuFit team stands apart in its approach. “Medical practitioners and individuals are not motivated to change by extrinsic incentives alone,” says the NeuFit team. “The majority of people that have sustained long-term behavior change are motivated by intrinsic rewards. The sheer joy of an activity is more likely to be the driver for sustained change.”

To go along with a passion for healthy change, NeuFit also has a “Connected Device Engine” (CDE). This allows for a seamless integration of leading devices and mobile apps like Fitbit Ultra Tracker, Fitbit Aria, Zeo Sleep Manager, Withings WiFi Body Scale, Fitlinxx ActiPed, RunKeeper, MapMyFitness, Foursquare, and Instagram. The data you input into these other apps can then be transferred into data and currency for NeuFit. Thanks to the CDE, NeuFit is part of a network that focuses first and fully on the health of the user base.

With strong social networking features and the capability to fit snugly into any social circle, NeuFit has the potential to effectively create the healthy changes that the team wants to see. There is nothing to lose by signing up, except for perhaps a few pounds, and it is a great outlet to start building, maintaining, or enhancing a strong and healthy lifestyle. And the added incentive to beat your siblings or coworkers in a video game is too sweet to pass up.

NeuFit was a showcased startup at our Tech Cocktail San Francisco mixer in September.