Aetna and Mindbloom Gamify Wellness to Help Drive Healthy Habits

HARTFORD, Conn., and SEATTLE, Wash., April 11, 2012 — Collaborating to help individuals deeply engage in their personal wellness efforts, Aetna (NYSE: AET)  and Mindbloom (www.mindbloom.com) announced today  that they have made the premium Mindbloom Life Game available to all of Aetna’s members, as well as Aetna employees.

The Mindbloom Life Game blends the principles of behavioral science with social gaming to offer a fun, simple and effective way for Aetna to inspire people to live healthy, productive and balanced lives. The premium Mindbloom offering includes all the benefits of Mindbloom’s popular consumer Life Game, plus access to more music, an expanded gallery of images, and unlimited personal media storage. 

“A significant amount of total health care costs stem from lifestyle choices such as lack of exercise, failing to eat properly and smoking,” said Dan Brostek, head of member and consumer engagement at Aetna. “Mindbloom cannot only help users manage specific physical conditions but can also help them monitor areas often correlated to health outcomes but considered ‘unmentionables’ in the current health care system such as stress related to jobs or caregiving, relationship conflicts, unhealthy sex life or financial issues.”

Aetna users also will have access to Mindbloom’s inspiration reminder mobile app called Bloom*, which launched in November and has already garnered more than 250,000 downloads inthe iTunes Store. The Bloom* app can help users keep what’s important top-of-mind while on-the-go and remind users to make healthy choices, stay connected with others, manage stress, strengthen their spirit, save money, advance their career, and enhance their creativity.

Helping People Improve Their Lives
Marvina Hirni, 47, for instance, suffers from Fibromyalgia and recently turned to Mindbloom to help manage her chronic disease. Hirni experiences debilitating pain, and simple tasks often become challenging. She uses Mindbloom to create and record her daily progress, which she then shares with her doctor.

“Fibromyalgia sometimes prevents me from stepping outside or even making a phone call to a friend. But after using Mindbloom, I’ve learned to appreciate the smallest accomplishments in life, record them and find strength to deal with my symptoms,” said Hirni. “It sounds simple because it is but Mindbloom has been an incredibly powerful, yet enjoyable experience when having to manage this disease.”

Since its official debut in September 2011, Mindbloom’s Life Game for consumers has organically grown to more than 50,000 registered users who have successfully followed through on more than 1.5 million commitments to improve their quality of life. Utilizing gamification techniques, Mindbloom has been able to successfully inspire its users to define what’s important, discover what motivates them, and take meaningful daily actions in all areas of their life. Members visit the site an average of nearly 4 times per week with an average engagement time of 14:41 minutes per visit, where they grow and maintain a virtual “life tree” and a forest of their family and friends, earn virtual rewards and most importantly make progress in their real lives. To date, Mindbloom Life Game users have followed through on more than 60 percent of their commitments to unlock rewards, new levels and content.

“After a decade designing an award-winning computer game like F.E.A.R., I found a more important purpose for my craft – engaging people in the quality of their lives in ways that are highly dynamic, extremely effective and very fun,” said Chris Hewett, co-founder and executive producer of Mindbloom. “Our collaboration with Aetna takes our social game to a new level, and brings more people new ways to prevent or manage disease and improve overall wellness.”

For an overview of how the Mindbloom Life Game works, visit http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezZxHCYezqM or check out the Bloom app at http://vimeo.com/31439840.

About Mindbloom
Mindbloom is a Seattle-based interactive media company that’s out to make life improvement accessible to everyone. By harnessing next-generation engagement techniques and focusing users on personal growth, Mindbloom has created a fun, simple, and effective way for people to improve the quality of their lives. To start living a healthier and more balanced life, visit: www.mindbloom.com. You can also find Mindbloom on Facebook at www.facebook.com/mindbloom or on Twitter at @mindbloom.

About Aetna
Aetna is one of the nation's leading diversified health care benefits companies, serving approximately 36.4 million people with information and resources to help them make better informed decisions about their health care. Aetna offers a broad range of traditional, voluntary and consumer-directed health insurance products and related services, including medical, pharmacy, dental, behavioral health, group life and disability plans, medical management capabilities, health care management services for Medicaid plans and health information exchange technology services. Our customers include employer groups, individuals, college students, part-time and hourly workers, health plans, health care providers, governmental units, government-sponsored plans, labor groups and expatriates. For more information, see www.aetna.com.

Mindbloom and Life Game are trademarks of Mindbloom, Inc. Apple, the Apple logo and iTunes Store are trademarks of Apple Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries. Other products and company names mentioned are the trademarks of their respective owners.