Changing behaviours for good, in general can be an incredibly powerful way to encourage new habits and change attitudes. There are particular societal issues where behaviour change is commonly used and recognised as a valuable tool. Behaviour change is often used to protect our environment, to help reduce climate change and more and more to benefit our health.

Behaviour change contains a broad range of activities and approaches which focus on the individual, community, and environmental influences on behaviour. If you’re not familiar with how to achieve this, I recommend having a read of BJ Fogg’s website where he explains the importance of motivation, ability, and trigger.

Behaviour change can be achieved through simple messaging, focused communications, engagement and empowerment. But, to add an interesting angle to behaviour change, iBehave is looking at how technology can be used to benefit our health:

iBehave is a meetup focused on the usage of technology as an enabler of behaviour change by enabling behavioural transition from risk behaviours to those akin with positive health outcomes. Our mission is to provide an OPEN INNOVATION ecosystem designed to:

1. Enable the achievement of game changing health outcomes by showcasing, encouraging and accelerating technical innovations where game mechanics related techniques can be used to drive behaviour change and compliance.

2. Foster a community of companies and individuals interested in enacting behavioural change in the healthcare industry through game mechanics related behaviour change techniques.

iBehave hosted a MeetUp on 26 March titled ‘Increasing condom usage among men through Tech – how do you change behaviour?’

Dr Julia Bailey, a clinical senior lecturer in Primary Care at UCL and Damian Hampton, head of technology for Illumina Digital gave an insightful presentation about project SexUnzipped: a website about sex, relationships and sexual health for young people over 16. 

• Did you know that STI’s cost the NHS a £1 billion a year!?
• Did you know that gonorrhoea will become untreatable in the future with the resistance to antibiotics?

The presentations were excellent at setting the scene, gave us a better understanding of how technology is currently being used to change behaviour around sexual health and created an opportunity to ask questions. Following the presentations, the behaviour mechanics that attended the MeetUp broke into groups to take part in an innovation session to unlock ideas on how technology can address the challenge of ‘Increasing condom usage among men through tech’.

Here are some of the questions put to the behaviour mechanics that attended the innovation session:
–How do you get a man to decide he’s going to wear a condom before things start getting heated up?
–How can we get women to veto sex without a condom?
–How can we reduce/eliminate the embarrassment, time and cost to getting condoms?
–How can you use technology to “sex educate” our target audience?
–How would you incentivise our target audience to engage with the content?

And here is a little video which explains what the behaviour mechanics thought of the event:

Interested in coming along to the next MeetUp? We’ll be discussing obesity in low income communities on 13 May – it will be provocative. It will be interesting! Be sure to sign up through the MeetUp page to guarantee your place.