QoL Devices, Inc.: Alvio

 
Campaign Summary

While medications help children who suffer from asthma, most parents are looking for better solutions to manage their kids’ breathing. Alvio is a new product that tracks data and offers lung training. It appeals to kids because it’s a video game that uses a person’s lungs to control the game instead of a standard game controller.

Strategy

Objective and Context:

Asthma is a debilitating condition that can restrict a child’s life. Medication can help, but most parents are concerned about overmedicating their kids and are looking for better solutions. But when asthma patients track their conditions and exercise their lungs, it cuts their need for medication by up to 86 percent. The devices patients are given today, however, don’t track data or offer lung training, and predictably draw little interest from children.  

Children with asthma and their parents would benefit from the child doing more breathing exercises, but existing devices are scary, boring, or both. Alvio saw an opportunity to create a breathing training device that acts like a game controller. But instead of using thumbs, users control the game with their breathing. 

The campaign’s objective was to create a connected device platform to help children with asthma to train, track, and analyze their respiratory activities, and ultimately, help them breathe more easily.  Additionally, Alvio wanted to raise a significant injection of capital to help further accelerate its business.

Target Audience:

The target audience was children from age six to 16 with asthma.

Creative Strategy:

Alvio and its media partner created the entire groundbreaking product and experience, from branding and naming to positioning and targeting, from refining and prototyping the breathing controller to the user experience of the app and the games themselves.

Together they worked closely to raise general awareness among the venture capitalist (VC) investment community, the advertising community, and the general tech community. Alvio participated in two investor demo days where hundreds of attendees from the VC community came to hear about its product and the investment pitch.

Execution

Overall Campaign Execution:

In Alvio’s first year of existence, it was successfully rebranded, its products and service offering refined, and now it is being piloted by Montefiore Medical Center, the University Hospital for Albert Einstein College of Medicine. There is no other product on the market currently tackling children’s asthma issues in a similar way.

Mobile Execution:

Alvio created a Bluetooth LE spirometer that connected to an iPad-based video game. The Bluetooth LE spirometer served as a video game controller, which made the breathing exercises fun for kids. Alvio tracks users’ progress while they play. And because it’s fun, kids will keep playing while they get healthier. Alvio’s games are designed around the ways people need to improve their lung health. Inhaling and exhaling moves the character up and down to hit targets. Other games measure how hard a user can exhale, which is a very important indicator of the seriousness of a person’s asthma condition.

There are currently zero campaign budget dollars set aside to promote Alvio: it has earned global awareness and recognition purely through press, PR, speaking engagements, conferences, and award shows.

Results (including context, evaluation, and market impact)

Alvio is partnering with some of the top hospitals in the U.S. to make the games even more useful, which will help more kids suffering from asthma go out and play and, of course, breathe more easily.

Alvio is winning recognition as awareness continues to grow for the product. In June 2014, the brand won a Gold Cannes Lion in Networked Mobile Technology, a Bronze Cannes Lion in Tablet Apps/Product, and a NYCEDC Pilot Health award for clinical studies at Montefiore/Albert Einstein Medical Center in July.


Categories: Innovation, Product/Services Launch, Tablet Campaign | Industries: Healthcare | Objectives: Innovation, Product/Services Launch, Tablet Campaign | Awards: Gold Winner, Silver Winner