Thryve & Sidekick: Improving Digital Obesity Monitoring

Digital therapeutics promise scalable, personalized care but only if they are supported by accurate data and seamless patient experiences. Sidekick, through its medically certified therapy zanadio, helps people with obesity by combining behavioral science, neuroscience, and evidence-based care. To deliver lasting lifestyle change, Sidekick needed a reliable way to access real-world activity data without overburdening users or compromising compliance.

The Partnership: 

Sidekick is a leading digital therapeutics company focused on obesity treatment. Its solution, zanadio, is among the first digital health applications in Germany to receive approval under the Digital Healthcare Act (DiGA). The program integrates coaching, cognitive behavioral therapy, and nutritional guidance all delivered digitally.

For zanadio to succeed, patients’ activity levels and behaviors had to be tracked continuously, with minimal user input. Manual logging wasn’t feasible at scale, and off-the-shelf wearable integrations came with technical, regulatory, and reliability challenges. Thryve’s role was to close this gap by delivering the compliant data infrastructure and seamless integrations needed to capture these signals reliably and make them usable for therapy optimization.

The Challenge: 

Despite its strong clinical framework, Sidekick encountered barriers that limited scalability:

• Self-Reported Data Limitations: Manual logging added burden and frustration for patients while producing inconsistent, error-prone data.
• Lack of Granularity: Therapists needed insights into activity intensity, daily movement trends, and behavioral patterns, which were not captured through simple forms.
• Integration Burden: Wearables offered potential, but building and maintaining direct connections with Apple, Fitbit, Garmin, Google Fit, and others was technically complex, resource-heavy, and difficult to sustain.

To grow, Sidekick needed a compliant, effortless, and scalable solution for wearable health data.

The Solution: Thryve’s Clinical Data Infrastructure

Thryve partnered with Sidekick to integrate wearable intelligence directly into the zanadio ecosystem. With Thryve’s unified SDK and API, Sidekick gained:

• Secure Access to 500+ Wearables: A single integration unlocked compliant data access across the global device ecosystem.
• Passive, High-Fidelity Data Collection: 24/7 real-time sync of steps, heart rate, activity duration, and intensity, without patient effort.
• Validated Metrics for Clinical Use: Standardized data ready for therapeutic models and outcome measurement.
• Frictionless User Experience: Patients simply connected their devices once, with no ongoing burden.

For Sidekick, this meant reliable, granular health insights that enhanced therapy delivery while reducing technical and compliance overhead.

The Results: 

This collaboration highlights how digital therapeutics can move beyond self-reported guesswork. By embedding real-world wearable data into zanadio, Sidekick created a therapy experience that is both medically compliant and highly engaging. The result: better outcomes for patients, stronger evidence for payors, and reduced burden on providers. 

With Thryve’s infrastructure in place, Sidekick was able to:

• Lower friction for users, improving participation and adherence
• Objectively validate therapy outcomes for communication with payors and regulators
• Enhance user motivation by reflecting genuine progress through data
• Establish a scalable data backbone to support analytics, new features, and future studies

Want the full details and outcomes?
Download the Sidekick Case Study PDF to explore comprehensive insights and impact metrics.

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