Gero Lab: Using Everyday Movement to Predict Risk of Age-Related Diseases

Locomotome, as coined by the Human Locomotome Project is a set of human locomotive data that can be analyzed to predict human stress levels and proclivity of age-related metabolic or degenerative disorders.

Gero Lab, a new and burgeoning company in this space, has been collecting locomotome data to discover markers of age-related diseases and evaluate the clinical importance of these markers. They have an app that collects initial answers to health questions and then uses activity data from devices like FitBit, Jawbone, and Bodymedia to further cement their locomotome models. Users are then sent metrics on their neurological state and potential health conditions, increasing their awareness of various health factors important for early prevention and lifestyle changes.

Gero co-founder Vera Kozyr answers some of my questions below.

What was the driving force to create Gero? What are the company’s goals?

We were originally studying different biological signals including transcriptome and genome signals, looking for signatures of aging and associated chronic deceases. Then we realized that the locomotome signal is extremely rich and much more convenient to gather, so we adjusted all our mathematical models and algorithms for it. The goal of our company is to create a convenient (non-invasive and seamless) and reliable tool for the early stage diagnosis of different diseases.

How can data collected and used in Gero models be translated into action items for users?

Awareness is very important when it comes to health. Early warnings can be impactful, especially for slowly developing health conditions. For example, life-style changes during the early stages of diabetes type 2 can significantly slow down the development of the disease or even reverse it. In the future, after passing FDA approval, GERO technology could also be used by doctors for preventative measures.

What are some of the most interesting bits of data that you have gathered so far? What is to come?

The key takeaways of our first 3,000 Fitbit study (finished in November of last year) are:

• Motor activity contains signatures of particular chronic deceases (metabolic, psychiatric and neurological)
• Low-resolution trackers (e.g. Fitbit, Jawbone, etc.) can also be used with GERO’s mathematical model with sufficient tracking time
• We are already passed the proof of concept phase to detect particular health conditions with accuracy

We keep working on increasing the accuracy of our algorithms. Along with disease risks and trends, we have learned to detect biological age and gender. At the moment we are focusing on diabetes and soon will publish some of our very interesting findings.

How does the app / data interface help users?

As we are still in the research stage we don’t claim that our app helps users at the moment. It collects activity data and helps to develop our technology. Individual health reports that we will release to our participants of course might potentially help by giving awareness of health conditions and showing their trends.

CarePredict: Monitoring Aging Parents for the Tech Generation

Millions of Americans take care of their aging parents while managing work and raising their own families. These adults are part of the ‘Sandwich Generation,’ and are constantly on call to help ailing family members. One of the toughest and most time consuming activities to do as a part-time informal caretaker is to track behaviors and note subtle day-to-day fluctuations that might hint towards bigger issues. CarePredict, founded by Satish Movva, founder of ContinuLink, is a wearable device company that assists adult children in tracking their aging parents’ health and activities.

The Tempo is the company’s first device, which tracks the wearer’s location within the home and learns their normal pattern of movement. Cleverly named, when there is a potential concerning change to the users daily tempo (in activities such as standing, walking, and sitting), the device notifies all caregivers in a text or email about the discrepancy.

The sensor is easy to wear and detects different motions. This motion data is transmitted wirelessly to the CarePredict beacon, which understands the location of the user and sends all the data from the wearable to CarePredict’s servers for analysis. The data can be monitored from an online account or smartphone app. CarePredict, currently taking pre-orders, is slated to launch next month.

Founder Interview: Matt Mattox, Co-Founder and VP of Products at Axial Exchange

I spoke with Matt Mattox, Co-Founder and VP of Products at Axial Exchange last week to learn more about Axial’s patient engagement software. They are currently working with 13 health systems, encompassing 70 hospitals – I downloaded the University of Colorado Health app as an example.

The app makes it easy to search for physicians in your vicinity under your health system, track and manage medications, as well as monitor changes in your body – anything from migraines to glucose readings. All of this information (plus more, like syncing your Fitbit), is consolidated into one place.

Matt believes that medication management is the most important feature of the app. “Not adhering to medication is a $100BN+ problem. We believe that if there is an adjustment to meds, the patient should know at once, and be reminded to change his intake.”

So how is this app different from other ones on the market? Matt gives an example, “If a patient has congestive heart failure and is using a weight tracker – his physician should know when there is a spike in weight. When that patient visits his care provider, we make it easy to create and share a formatted report of his health data so his physician can see what’s going on.” On the provider side, hospitals also have access to an analytics dashboard where they can monitor engagement.

As a patient, you might be using an app by Axial Exchange already and not even know it. The company doesn’t promote itself; instead Axial works with health systems to market the app to patients.

I asked Matt if giving a doctor too much patient data could be a bad thing. “We try to make the information count. For example, if a patient has diabetes, there are really only a few important things he needs to remember – don’t drink carbs, don’t eat foods you can buy in a convenience store or gas station – we try to boil down health information into actionable advice. On the tracker front, we don’t anticipate that all our patients will pour over their kidney function data and every lab value, but our providers do want to know if they are sleeping well and if they are taking medications on time and following a diet. Our goal is to focus on sustainable engagement, where clients know that the app is part of the prescription and they use it daily to manage their health.”

Axial is working on designing a disease management application as well, which will offer a clear set of learning and tracking objectives for self-managed care. I’m very excited for Axial Exchange’s growth, and hope the app comes to my health system soon. They truly offer the analytics and services needed to create successful patient engagement and promote healthy living.

Health 2.0: How to Use Data Around You to Lead a Healthier Life

Health 2.0 once again exceeded my expectations with their 7^th Annual Fall Conference, this year in Santa Clara. Needless to say, I have too much to share in just one post. Today I’ll focus on Tuesday’s morning hot topic, Big Data. In rapid fire, leaders in health data aggregation and comprehension spoke and presented demos.

Here is a snapshot of a few companies that presented in Big Data: Tools and Applications for Individuals.

Ben Wolin, Co-Founder and CEO, Everyday Health

• Everyday Health has self-learning data algorithms that personalized your healthcare exploration. Using over 6.9 billion data points, 4.5 billion newsletter opens and many fancy data algorithms, they are able to tailor healthcare information for you
• Essentially, they are the Pandora for health, but with much more data
• They have proved $2.3 billion in healthcare savings so far

Gideon Mantel, Executive Chairman, Treato

• Treato lets patients comment on their prescription drug use and then shows how those drugs fare alongside their comparable medications
• Using crowdsourced patient data, you can easily see which medications cause which types of problems for patients
• Below, Tecfidera (BG-12) has worse feedback then Copaxone and Tysabri for MS treatments. You can dig in deeper on the website to see exactly why, and what patients have listed as top concerns for the drug

Philippe Schwartz, President, Withings

• This year Withings, maker of the smart body analyzer scale and blood pressure monitor, has come out with an activity tracker, the Withings Pulse
• The device can differentiate between walking and running automatically as well as measure your heart beat
• A more detailed post on the Pulse to come!

John De Souza, President and CEO, MedHelp

• MedHelp has created apps to track a variety of health events, such as women’s health, diet and mental health
• They are releasing an app that lets you get instant feedback on your lab results, and grants you access to health coaches who can give you advice when something doesn’t look right (such as cutting back on salt if your lab tests show high cholesterol)
• The app also allows for involvement from your friends and family into helping you keep a healthy lifestyle. As Peter Tippett, CMO & VP of Verizon said, “Social is what drives change in individuals – it’s the little nudge that helps you quit smoking, it’s not you, it is your surround sound.”

Marvin Ammori, Co-Founder and CEO, Silica Labs

• Marvin showed us how Google Glass can be used in healthcare, from recording a doctor-patient interaction so that the patient can rewatch the interaction later, or by recording a surgery so that a specialist far away can help, or by creating a surgery checklist for a surgeon in the operating room
• Glass can even be used in the battlefield to tap into the activity monitors of soldiers to tell a medic which injured fighter needs the most immediate help

Bill Davenhall, Global Manager, Health and Human Services, ESRI

• I’ve posted on ESRI before – I think it is an excellent tool to see geographic health information
• The ESRI Geomedicine application lets you see the heart attack rate as well as the toxic release inventory of an area
• Every triangle is something that is bad for your health in your neighborhood
• The dashboard also gives a walk score (San Francisco at 97, is excellent)

Japan: Healthy Eating Makes an Impact

During these past three weeks spent in Asia, I’ve noticed that the citizens of Japan are generally, as a whole, very healthy. In fact, for the past 20 years, Japan has been ranked number one in the world in both life expectancy and healthy life expectancy rates. Experts contribute this mainly to diet – traditional Japanese food is low in fat and cholesterol, which are main contributors to heart disease.

Now I’m not suggesting that you incorporate tofu, seaweed, fish, rice and miso into your daily diet, but in terms of looking at the health of Japan versus the health of the United States these past few decades as a longitudinal study, cutting down on saturated fats and complex sugars becomes obvious to maintaining good health.

To be transparent, as I ate the aforementioned five ingredients three times a day for a week in Japan, I noticed that the Japanese do like their salt. Heavy salt intake can lead to other issues including high blood pressure, which coincidentally is one of the major risk factors for death among adults in Japan. Nonetheless, this trip has made it exceptionally clear to me what cutting down on saturated fats and sugar can do for my health long term.

Kinkakuji (Golden Pavilion, Kyoto); Even the train food is healthy and well proportioned (Shinkansen Bullet Train); Typical breakfast in Tokyo

Glassomics: Newly Launched Medical Glassware Incubator

Glassomics is a newly launched medical glassware incubator, exploring and creating new ways to use glasses-like wearables in healthcare. With Google Glass growing in hype, it’s not surprising that Palomar Health and Qualcomm Life created Glassomics to innovate uses for glasswear and start discussions regarding security and liability concerns for such technologies.

Sparseware, a San Diego based software engineering firm, will be leading the development of the initial glasswear prototypes and will test the technology at the new $1B Palomar Health, deemed the “Hospital of the Future.”

Glassware abilities (for hospitals) that I find most interesting are:

• facial, voice, vital signs recognition
• image detection – cross checking prescriptions, allergy tags
• instant access to patient records/medical dictionary
• built-in camera during surgery/instructional videos
• easy note annotation
• decision support
• sending information/photos from one place to another (i.e. ambulance to surgery room)
• alerts, reminders, scheduling

I look forward to the first round of healthcare applications for glasswear and will be following this closely.

OMsignal: Making body monitoring clothing a reality

OMsignal is entering the wearables space by creating a form flattering compression shirt that uses sensors embedded into the shirt to measure vital signals and daily physical activity. The data is transmitted to a smartphone app where users can track anything from their activity, heart rate, respiratory rate, breathing balance, calories burned, emotive state and more. Users can link together to monitor each other and set alerts. Prototypes of the shirt are now being distributed to interested third-party developers who are looking for ways to use the data collected to create apps on the OMsignal platform. When the shirts are finally rolled out, I suspect a string of interesting apps will also be released.

Scanadu Scout: A Medical Tricorder Dr. McCoy Would Want

Scanadu is building products that enable users to monitor their health at any time, any place. The company is focused on wireless devices that sync to a smart phone app to show users health data, which can lead to informed health triage.

The Scanadu Scout, widely proclaimed as a “medical grade Tricorder” can measure heart rate, body temperature, respiratory rate, blood pressure, ECG, emotional stress and more. How does it work? Place the Scout on your forehead for 10 seconds and your stats will be instantly displayed on your phone app. The makers of the Scout want it to be a FDA recognized medical device. They are offering users an exploratory version of the device and asking them to opt-in to initial clinical studies. Scanadu is a participant in the Qualcomm Tricorder X-Prize and I am certainly excited to see what other healthcare forward technologies will be created from the competition.

MC10: Smart, Ultrathin and Flexible Wearable Sensors

MC10 uses stretchable circuit technology to make lightweight and flexible body monitoring patches. These patches can bend, stretch and move with the human skin they are applied on and can monitor anything from blood pressure to brain activity and muscle function. These patches transmit data to the users’ mobile device so monitoring can be done wirelessly and in real-time. The patches are powered in various ways including using thin film batteries and built-in inductive power capabilities. While the company is currently focused on athletes (i.e. health and fitness applications and partnerships with Reebok and McKesson), their products have wide and scalable possibilities ranging from monitoring babies to people with chronic disorders. MC10 raised additional capital last week.

Omada Health: Preventative Medicine, Starting with Diabetes

Omada Health is changing the way people reduce their risk of type 2 diabetes. Through their Prevent program, built on research in behavior change and disease prevention, members use personalized coaching, community support and tracking tools to create and continue healthy behaviors. From weight loss to lifestyle changes, Prevent hopes to stop the progression from prediabetes to type 2 diabetes. The Prevent website mentions that “on average, our participants lose 6% of their body weight in just 16 weeks, exceeding clinical results and putting them on the path toward lifelong health.” Additionally, these preventative measures decrease the financial burden of chronic diseases for participants as well as for the overall healthcare system. Omada partners with employers, providers and health plans to deliver the Prevent experience and the company is actively working on other solutions to prevent additional chronic diseases.

You can sign up for the Prevent 16-week program online.