nir-vana innovation network

The UK start-up has developed a tool to improve family wellbeing through an app which combines intergenerational, out-of-screen activities and gamification features which maximise engagement, bringing families together to spend quality time, exercising more, eating better, and improving their overall mental health. The app is based on over 160 health activities and personalised avatars allowing each family to gamify their experience and track progress. It features personalised, animated avatars allowing each family to track progress, level up, and earn badges for added motivation and long-term engagement.

With this app, families have an effective, enjoyable and accessible tool, which contains over 160 health activities, designed to help them to effortlessly exercise more, eat better, and take care of their mental health, such as fun workouts, collective recipes and family mindfulness activities. It combines this extensive variety of simple and engaging activities with gamification. It does so through their own animated avatars allowing each family to track progress, go up levels, earn badges and more for added motivation and long-term engagement. It relieves families of the significant challenge of trying to improve and maintain good health on their own, reducing unnecessary stress, and promoting quality time together through easily accessing engaging healthy activities they can do together - anytime, anywhere.

The app fulfils the gap in the market for a digital family health solution which is long overdue. Without the app families will continue to have limited support to care of their family's health along with all the responsibility of parenthood.

Through the apps unique function, positive social impacts entail improved physical and mental health, social inclusion of all family members and health education. Over 50 of users have already stated these impacts through testimonials, promoting a better home environment, subsequently increasing mental health.

The company is interested in partnering with entities in the space of education and healthcare, including but not limited to schools, education institutions, non-profit organisations, and governmental actors supporting families. Partners should be willing to test and validate the app to ascertain positive impact on the health and wellbeing of users and potentially co-design innovative features. In this context, a commercial agreement with technical assistance is sought.

Advantages & innovations

Today more than ever, the mental, physical, and nutritional wellbeing of families is a crucial aspects of society that need to be nurtured and improved. The Start up addresses 2 important global challenges: 1) 160 million obese children globally, forecasted to increase to 250 million by 2030 (20.2% of children in the UK are obese). 2) 50% of mental health issues are established by the age of 14 While there are over 350,000 health and fitness digital health apps to help individuals, no digital solution is currently available to specifically help families engage in healthy activities together. The start up's research found 422 out of 504 families stated they wanted a solution such as this app. Whilst 10 years ago 'Famtech' was a niche market, it is now growing rapidly and present a real opportunity. The value of the Famtech sector is due to reach $1.1 billion in revenue by 2024 with a CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate) of 12.9%. Yet, no other solution targets the health and wellbeing of family holistically which makes the UK start-up a pioneer in the Famtech space. In 2021, the UK start-up: - Won Sweden's Grand Challenge Hackathon as the preferred solution to prevent childhood obesity for children under 6 years of age, - launched the app across the UK and globally, gaining 8000 users across +10 countries, - gained a US based B2B customer, a medical device company, which now has licensed the app to offer to its employees as a contractual perk, - been adopted by primary schools in the UK through which the app's health challenges are set as 'fun homework'.

Stage of development

Already on the market

Partner sought

Partners sought include entities in the space of education and healthcare, including but not limited to schools, education institutions, non-profit organisations, and governmental actors supporting families. Partners should be willing to test and validate the app to ascertain positive impact on the health and wellbeing of users and potentially co-design innovative features to further develop the technology. As part of the partnership the UK company will transfer their app technology which is helping families with children aged 4-12 to improve their health in a fun and simple way through gamification based content covering exercise, nutrition, and mental health. In return the UK company expects the partner to test, validate and distribute the technology amongst relevant users (families with young children). The role of the partner sought is to use the app to positively impact the health and wellbeing of users and collect data on its usage and impact in order to further adapt and improve the technology.