How a Mobile Health App keeps you fit

People are nowadays investing huge amount of money on themselves on their physique, appearance and that is why gyms are brooming and getting a lot of attention. Dataquest spoke to Ritu Soni Srivastava, the Founder of ObiNo, a weight loss and Health coaching solution app on mobile to loose weight and get fit and healthier. Excerpts

Describe about some unique features of this app?

Our core differentiation is our focus on coaching - using our artificially intelligent technology and algorithms to super-personalize the health coaching experience and also to scale the productivity of our coaches with human-assisted intelligence.

In healthcare and especially service-based healthcare, quality is the differentiator and our coaches are extremely high-quality (clinical nutritionists and registered dieticians only) and high-touch (minimum of 6 daily touch-points between each user and coach). As is evidenced by our high renewal rates for paid customers, our quality is ensured even at scale (thousands of users) by deploying intelligence ensure that each coach is able to handle a large number of users without loss in meaningful rapport and support.

How many people have downloaded this app?

ObiNo’s Android app has been used by over 2.5 lakh Indians to lose weight, get fit and become healthier. With a 4.4 Rating on the Google Play Store and thousands of delighted customers in India and abroad, ObiNo has been labeled as ‘useful’, ‘easy to use’ by users on Playstore.

How is this different from regular gyms? As in how does it help?

ObiNo helps its users by intelligently pairing each of them with their own personal health coach, who work one-on-one to develop customized diet, fitness and lifestyle regimes to achieve their health goals – be it losing weight, getting fitter or improving their health outcomes. And all this is done via the mobile phone, leveraging the unique ecosystem of the ObiNo app.

ObiNo provides a holistic weight loss and health coaching solution on its app with its:

• Expert health coaches

• Indian calorie counter (India’s 2nd largest Indian foods & exercise database)

• In-built pedometer

• Intelligent recommendations on food & exercise

• Personalized diet & fitness plans

• Dietician-created healthy recipes

• Healthy reminders

• Compelling articles, tips and blogs from experts and bloggers

How has your team been helpful in creating this app?

ObiNo is now a team of 18 people, from the fields of Technology, Product Management, Nutrition and Marketing, who are all users themselves.

With extensive experience in the health space and strong consumer insights, this is a team that has helped people lose over 15,000 kilos of weight over the last few months alone.

How can this app track your diet intake?

ObiNo is equipped with India’s 2nd largest database of Indian foods, over 7,000  Indian dishes with detailed calorie and macronutrient breakups, allowing people to find almost every Indian food that they eat with over 18 cuisines represented.

It also has India’s only healthy-meal-recommendation engine that suggests calorie-counted and nutritionally-balanced meals to users, allowing them to use the virtual dietician model anywhere.

What is the growth ratio of the company?

In the last 5 months, ObiNo has grown it’s Active user base by 5x and its Revenues by 7x with minimal marketing spends and a very small, capital-efficient team.

What are Obino's future plan?

ObiNo firmly believes that expert personal coaching is the best way to help people get started on the journey of achieving their health and weight loss goals. But as the product grows and scales, the challenge of the future will be in achieving the same high-quality, high-touch coaching experience but for millions of users…coaching at scale.

It is working on human-assisted intelligence models to allow their high-quality coaches help a larger number of users and an artificially intelligent coaching model that provides a super-personalized experience, even at scale.