Everyone says their app is unique, here is why HSI actually is
- Post by: Ric Merrifield
- January 25, 2022
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With the sea of self-help and coaching apps, blogs, and books on the market, it can be difficult to know what to choose, or what to even trust. This cartoon from The New Yorker Magazine sums it up well.
OneItem offers an array of solutions to help people receive daily coaching on how to achieve the one goal they have chosen as most important to them, and that coaching is personalized for the user based on input they have given about their specific situation. What’s unique about all of this, is something that is currently patent-pending, and since that has been filed, we can describe it. This will be a relatively high-level description; we are happy to discuss more details about this if you are interested.
- Focus Factors. While it may seem self-descriptive that we coach the user on where to focus, there is more it than that. A Determinant is term used commonly in science, and it refers to something experts have established to have a positive impact towards achieving a desired goal or outcome. So, when you see a list of 100 foods to eat or not eat, or exercises to do or not do, Determinants, and the Focus Factors that come from them have been proven to be the most influential relative to a goal. We have many areas of improvement available on our platform ranging from weight loss to cardiac care, even athletic performance, and in every case, the Focus Factors were established by professionals in the industry including doctors and PhDs.
- Scoring. With the established list of Focus Factors for each goal, the user then scores each one on a score of 0-10 (it is explained in each case whether the 10 is the best or most in need of improvement) on how they are currently doing relative to that Focus Factor. In some instances, a user may interact with their doctor or health care provider to have them complete the scoring.
- Importance. With the list of Focus Factors having now been scored, the user is then asked to rate the Importance level of each one, often in a high, medium, low format.
- Gap. Once the user has completed their data entry, we create what we call a Weighted Opportunity Gap. The weighting of importance, together with the scoring of this importance are what are used for this. This refers to the difference/delta between what is available for improvement for the user based on the results of the system’s computations. Put simply, for every focus factor a percentage is generated, so you might be at 80% of a given Focus Factor, but 100% may not be your goal or be realistic. It may only be realistic for a user to achieve 90%, so that difference between 80% and 90% is the Opportunity Gap, and that’s what is used from a coaching standpoint to help the user be laser-focused on the definition, and measure of success.
- Invert it. The final step is the most complex, and it is called Advanced Inverse Weighting by Ranking – the name given to an algorithm that generates the personalized optimization scores.
So, this is much more than just sorting a few things based on some user inputs, it’s taking an expert-derived list of Focus Factors, then having them scored for current performance and importance, assessing just how much they can improve, and then define how much improvement is possible, followed by the final step of generating optimization scores.
With that solid foundation as a starting point, every day the application looks at the information it has and derives a list of the three most important things that person needs to work on, today, to move forward with their specific goal. And the user does not need to do much more data entry – all they need to do Is indicate when their performance on one of their Focus Factors has changed, so the system can recalculate Optimization Scores for tomorrow.
So hopefully that helps you understand not only what OneItem does, but also helps clarify why what we do is worth patenting, and why we are so confident we can help so many people achieve their goals.