Here at isoshealth everything we do is driven by the expertise of the healthcare professionals who use our platform to help you, our customers, achieve your health related goals. Our blog is no different to this. From answering your questions to providing top tips, our experts are here to help.

Are health apps helpful?

Whether we like it or not, health apps are becoming the norm. Not only are they being used all over the world for everything from sports performance tracking, diet and nutrition, meditation, weight loss and speaking to Practitioners. Apps now not only are for personal use and gain but are endorsed by the NHS with 40 of them being listed as useful.

Health apps and Mhealth solutions meet us where we already are – our phones and devices. There’s no need to change how we already live our lives apps integrate into our every day and synch up with wearables too. In this way, it is easy to make their use routine just like checking our emails or scrolling through social media might be.

But what about that first step? Good healthy habits are the goal, but how can apps really tap into our psyche and motivate us?

One type of health app that’s looked to do just that are those that play on the human need for reward. Making a change to our health or lifestyle, no matter how big or small can be tough. “Motivation has always been a key stumbling block when it comes to keeping fit and healthy. Health apps aim to bring a goals-based approach to the problem giving us unprecedented access to data about ourselves. This data helps us feel good about achieving new personal bests and seeing improvements over time.”, says founder and creator of fit-count Marc Asher.

But for some this type of data can be overwhelming or have no real meaning to people, especially in the beginning when progress might be slow. This stops them from having true ‘intrinsic’ motivation – pursuing changes because it makes them feel good because they enjoy it or get a mental benefit. And this is what Marc cleverly played on, “Combine data with a rewards-based approach such as financial incentives to do exercise that an app such as fit-count provides, and you have a powerful tool to make a positive lasting change to your lifestyle.”. fit-count effectively pushes people through the initially tough stage by giving a form of extrinsic motivation – offers and discounts in reward for steps and other activities.

In this way, you can really see the potential of health apps, not only fitting into our everyday lives but challenging our everyday habits. We’re proud to be represented on fit-count, with offers from us being unlocked at different stages of steps. They are soon to release their Android version and are already live on iOS. So, if you’ve got an iPhone, make sure you download fit-count today to get access to offers from us and plenty of other great businesses and brands.