Company type | Private |
---|---|
Industry | mHealth Startup |
Founded | 2011 |
Headquarters | San Francisco, California United States of America |
Number of locations | 2 |
Key people | Bhargav Sri Prakash, Founder and CEO |
Products | fooya |
Number of employees | 14 |
Website | www |
FriendsLearn is a privately held life science research and biotechnology mHealth company, with offices in San Francisco California and Chennai. [1] [2] The company was founded in 2011 and develops mobile health technologies, best known as the producer and developer of fooya!. [3] FriendsLearn is a pioneer of Digital Vaccines, which Carnegie Mellon University featured as one of the top breakthroughs in technology as part of the annual "Year in Review" publication. [4] The company is known for first in class therapeutic candidates in the field of neuromodulation and neurocognitive training [5] [6] through the use of artificial intelligence, virtual reality technology, neuropsychology based behavior design, [7] [8] gamification [9] and learnified [10] entertainment.
FriendsLearn is the founding research translation and innovation partner of Carnegie Mellon University's Digital Vaccine Project. [11] [12]
FriendsLearn and Carnegie Mellon University won the 2022 Transformative Business Award by the Financial Times and the World Bank's International Finance Corporation for their pioneering deep tech breakthroughs with Digital Vaccines under the category of Frontiers Market Solutions. [13] They were chosen by a panel of eminent judges from 219 nominations at a ceremony in London.
The company was founded by Bhargav Sri Prakash [14] when he was a fellow of the Kauffman Foundation in Kansas City. The United States Department of State and EducationUSA awarded FriendsLearn a contract to design and produce a gamified application based on a track record of the founder's previous company in gamified student recruitment. "Your 5 Steps to US Study" was launched in 2012 and is distributed around the world by US Consulates and EducationUSA centers. [15]
FriendsLearn has produced and designed the mobile app fooya, [16] which is the product of the company's innovations in 'learnified' gaming and was presented at the 2014 Stanford MedicineX Conference [17] under a session titled "Scalable Behavior Design through Mobile Gaming".
Health outcomes of clinical trials conducted by researchers at the Baylor College of Medicine's Children's Nutrition Research Center were presented at The Obesity Society's 2014 ObesityWeek Conference in Boston. [18]
In 2014, the company entered into a collaborative partnership with the 2014 ExxonMobil Bernard Harris Summer Science Camp [19] and was used to promote healthy choices among middle school campers from across the United States.
The company was featured at the Bloomberg Next Big Thing Conference in 2013 as an emerging startup in health gaming. [20] [21]
Fooya was first launched as a Facebook App in 2012 at the DEMO Conference in Silicon Valley [22] and successfully raised over $50,000 through a crowd funding campaign [23] via Kickstarter [24]
The Reciprocity Wave, a program conceived by Architect. Sheila Sri Prakash, is a Sculpture Competition where students create art work with recycled materials to sensitize the public about social and environmental issues that need immediate attention. Shilpa Architects have already conducted three such initiatives, two in Chennai [25] [26] and one in Bangalore. [27] [28] The most recent initiative at Cubbon Park, Bangalore, brought to light various issues ranging from corruption to women's rights, and gained attention from the Bangalore Media for the powerful concept and impact that it created. Many of the leading daily's published a series of articles about the event and also covered the competition at length. The event also included a Health Gaming Championship involving fooya!, in partnership with FriendsLearn.
Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The institution was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools. In 1912, it became the Carnegie Institute of Technology and began granting four-year degrees. In 1967, it became Carnegie Mellon University through its merger with the Mellon Institute of Industrial Research, founded in 1913 by Andrew Mellon and Richard B. Mellon and formerly a part of the University of Pittsburgh.
A food addiction or eating addiction is any behavioral addiction characterized primarily by the compulsive consumption of palatable and hyperpalatable food items. Such foods often have high sugar, fat, and salt contents, and markedly activate the reward system in humans and other animals. Those with eating addictions often overconsume such foods despite the adverse consequences associated with their overconsumption.
Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley is a degree-granting branch campus of Carnegie Mellon University located in Mountain View, California. It was established in 2002 at the NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field.
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Yves Béhar is a Swiss-born American designer, entrepreneur, and educator. He is the founder and principal designer of Fuseproject, an industrial design and brand development firm. Béhar is also the co-founder and Chief Creative Officer of August Smart Lock, a smart lock company acquired by Assa Abloy in 2017; and co-founder of Canopy, a co-working space based in San Francisco.
Playnormous was an online community of monster-themed games designed to change health behaviors in children and their parents. The games were developed in consultation with health researchers as a way to deliver game-based health interventions to the public at large. The games have been closed since 2016.
Let's Move! was a public health campaign in the United States led by former First Lady Michelle Obama. The campaign aimed to reduce childhood obesity and encourage a healthy lifestyle in children.
Gamification is the strategic attempt to enhance systems, services, organizations, and activities by creating similar experiences to those experienced when playing games in order to motivate and engage users. This is generally accomplished through the application of game design elements and game principles in non-game contexts.
Nutrition education is a combination of learning experiences designed to teach individuals or groups about the principles of a balanced diet, the importance of various nutrients, how to make healthy food choices, and how both dietary and exercise habits can affect overall well-being. It includes a combination of educational strategies, accompanied by environmental supports, designed to facilitate voluntary adoption of food choices and other nutrition-related behaviors conducive to well-being. Nutrition education is delivered through multiple venues and involves activities at the individual, community, and policy levels. Nutrition Education also critically looks at issues such as food security, food literacy, and food sustainability.
Criticism of fast food includes claims of negative health effects, animal cruelty, cases of worker exploitation, children-targeted marketing and claims of cultural degradation via shifts in people's eating patterns away from traditional foods. Fast food chains have come under fire from consumer groups, such as the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a longtime fast food critic over issues such as caloric content, trans fats and portion sizes. Social scientists have highlighted how the prominence of fast food narratives in popular urban legends suggests that modern consumers have an ambivalent relationship with fast food, particularly in relation to children.
Zombies, Run! is a 2012 mobile fitness game co-developed and published by British studio Six to Start and Naomi Alderman for iOS and Android platforms. Set around Abel Township, a small outpost trying to survive the zombie apocalypse, players act as the character "Runner 5" through a series of missions during which they run, collect items to help the town survive and listen to various audio narrations to uncover mysteries.
Barry Michael Popkin is an American nutrition and obesity researcher at the Carolina Population Center and the W.R. Kenan Jr. Distinguished Professor of Nutrition at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Public Health, where he is the director of the Global Food Research Program. He developed the concept of "nutrition transition". He is the author of over 650 journal articles and a book, The World is Fat, translated into a dozen languages.
Habitica, formerly HabitRPG, is an online task management application developed by HabitRPG, Inc. It was founded on January 30, 2013. The application uses the format of a role-playing game to organize tasks. Habitica is an open source project. It has attracted the interest of scientific research into the efficacy of habit-forming.
This article summarizes healthcare in Texas. In 2022, the United Healthcare Foundation ranked Texas as the 38th healthiest state in the United States. Obesity, excessive drinking, maternal mortality, infant mortality, vaccinations, mental health, and limited access to healthcare are among the major public health issues facing Texas.
Mary Story is Professor of Global Health and Community and Family Medicine, and director of Education and Training, Duke Global Health Institute at Duke University. Dr. Story is a leading scholar on child and adolescent nutrition and child obesity prevention.
David Isaac Murray is an entrepreneur, computer scientist, and product designer best known for his appearance as one of the main cast members on Start-Ups: Silicon Valley. Originally a product manager at Google from 2006–2008, he received the Google Founders Award and EMG Award for his work on Gmail. After Google, David held several senior positions at start up companies in Silicon Valley, California. He started his company, GoalSponsors, in 2012 and eventually sold it to Doctor.com in 2014. He served as Chief Technology Officer of Doctor.com until 2019. David is currently Cofounder and President of Confirm, an HR technology company focused on performance reviews and organizational network analysis.
EChO - Eradicate Childhood Obesity Foundation, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) public charity based in Cambridge, MA dedicated to ending childhood obesity. Established in 2015, the foundation aims to promote healthier lifestyles through the use of nutrition education, technology, and novel, easy-to-understand food labels.
Jodi L. Forlizzi is a professor and Geschke Director, as well as an interaction designer and researcher, at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. On August 29, 2022, Forlizzi was named a Herbert A. Simon Professor at Carnegie Mellon. Her research ranges from understanding the limits of human attention to understanding how products and services evoke social behavior. Current research interests include interaction design, assistive, social, and aesthetic technology projects and systems, and notification systems. In 2014, Forlizzi was inducted into the CHI Academy for her notable works and contributions to the field of human-computer interaction.
Kurbo is a digital therapeutics program focused on sustainable healthy eating for children and teenagers. The program tracks and manages nutrition, exercise and weight of adolescents. It operates through a mobile application and a website, providing health coaching from weight loss and behavior change professionals to tackle childhood obesity.
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