News

How to Take Care of Your wellness during Covid

Published

1 week ago

01/09/2025

Kossi Adzo

We talked to Alex Devoto on how LVLFi offers a platform of apps and games that encourage and reward users to both take more steps and engage more with our client partner and he had the following to say about it.

First of all, how are you and your family doing in these COVID-19 times?

Alex Devoto: Wearing masks, social distancing, and staying safe!

Tell us about you, your career, how you founded LVLFi.

Alex Devoto: Well, I was born at an early age…My previous background was in manufacturing in China, where I spent 10 years developing electronics. But when I hit my mid-30s, I realized I needed to take care of my health better. However, I was not motivated to go to the gym, and I started looking into using gamification to boost my exercise. This was around when Pokemon Go came out, and the first papers written on the game showed that in 6 months, people playing the game walked a total of 8.7Bn Km and lost around 50M Kgs from the game. So here was a great data set to show people would walk more for virtual rewards. The increased steps lead to lower disease risk, which could be monetized by insurers.

How does LVLFi innovate?

Alex Devoto: By pushing the boundaries of using behavioral economics and gamification to increase customer engagement and obesity management for insurers. We game out ideas internally, trying to A/B with a select user group to see the most effective and ‘sticky.’

How the coronavirus pandemic affects your business, and how are you coping?

Alex Devoto: It put wellness down the list for the first few months certainly. As insurers are traditionally slow-moving businesses, they had some difficulty early on changing their work practices. Many also cut their innovation budgets as the pandemic hit, and they worried about large losses. However, after a few months, there was an increase in the mental wellness services we provide for insured/employees.

Did you have to make difficult choices, and what are the lessons learned?

Alex Devoto: We had to cut spending in light of fewer wellness contracts, which is always difficult. But we continued to innovate and develop a pipeline of products to be executed at a later date. Lessons learnt is to make yourself as flexible as possible to deal with any and all business environments.

How do you deal with stress and anxiety?

Alex Devoto: We’ve included a mental wellness component into our app platform for exactly this!

Who are your competitors? And how do you plan to stay in the game?

Alex Devoto: There are some other great wellness companies out there: Vitality, Wellsteps, etc. We believe we offer a more gamified and engrossing product at a cheaper price to differentiate ourselves, but it’s positive to see wellness as a whole being taken more seriously.