Feedback loops are changing health behavior

The premise of a feedback loop is simple: Give people real-time information about their actions, and they're more likely to change those actions for the better...The largest problem in medicine is noncompliance, the term for patients who don’t follow their doctor's prescribed orders. Studies show that half of all patients do not take prescribed medication as directed. Noncompliance adds $100 billion annually to US health care costs and leads to 125,000 unnecessary deaths from cardiovascular diseases alone every year—just from people failing to do what they know they should.

"People in general are disconnected from seeing the results of their health choices. We don't see our arteries clogging up because of the two donuts we eat every morning for breakfast," Susannah Fox, associate director for digital strategy at Pew, told eWEEK. "We lack these feedback loops that let us know you're doing the right thing [or] you're not doing the right thing," Fox said....