Saks Snacks #13: Oura's Newest Smart Ring, AR Fitness, Meta Makes Moves, Patina Emerges Out of Stealth
Play-To-Earn Fitness, Genopets' $8.3MRaise, AR for Fitness, BlueSemi, Longevity and Fasting
Hi friends from Kona, Hawaii, 👋
Hope you enjoy the quick health-tech content this week! Here’s what we’ll cover:
🥑 Snacks of the Week x 7
💡 Big Idea: AR / VR fitness
💸 Capital Raise Radar x 4
🏥 Healthcare startup out of stealth
Weekly Musings
🎙️ Pod of the Week: building the fitness metaverse
💥 Spark Moment: from Jan 1, 2021
✨ Endnote: featuring the promo code for the Fit Tech Summit
#1 🥑 Snacks of the week (x8)
Here are some of the best internet reads this week across Health + Tech
Put a 💍 on it:
Oura’s newest smart ring/wearable device features Sp02 sensing, period prediction, workout tracking, and daytime HR tracking. In addition to upgrading the hardware, it shifted business models too.
📺 Video link to learn more about Oura’s sleep tracking: its accuracy, improvements, algorithm changes, and comparisons to other wearables.
Meta (Facebook) makes moves:
VR Fitness: META, aka Facebook hones in on VR fitness as an important part of future business development. Zuckerberg on the Quest 2 as a fitness device - ‘it’s kind of like a peloton’
Meta’s leaked wearable device - with a camera. (link) - “Facebook’s Meta watch has a camera notch, according to first leaked image”.
Meta acquires VR Fitness app Supernatural, which has movement-based high-impact cardio exercises.
General Snacks:
Fintech, meet healthcare: Fintech’s growing role in the healthcare revolution. To curb the rise of chronic illnesses and the associated recurring costs, many startups are using behavioral economics and gamification to incentivize patients and build healthy habits.
Paceline Launches First-Ever Health & Wellness Credit Card - Paceline members who achieve 150 minutes of exercise each week unlock rewards, boosted cashback, and other benefits,
Longevity & fasting: How overnight fasting could extend lifespan -Intermittent fasting shows health + longevity benefits in a variety of species. This article published in Nature highlights a study that’s linked fasting results to the circadian clock.
📺 Vid: New aging reversal approaches presentation by David Sinclair
#2💡Big Ideas: future of VR/AR fitness?
Check out Nike + Snapchat’s AR running experience that uses Snap Spectacles.
Is the gif below a look into the “future of fitness”?
I do believe that gamified fitness, with social components, can bring a healthy lifestyle to millions of people previously unable to form habits around fitness.
However, we must bring this about in a responsible manner.
How can we create similar experiences as an entry point into new forms of fitness, while also not making users reliant on this digital input?
#3💰 Capital Raise Radar Snacks (x4)
The quick bullets from 4 venture raises, with more details below:
Primary Care, reinvented: Patina emerges out of stealth with $50M to reinvent primary care & aging experience. (More in #4, Healthcare)
Web 3: Play-to-Earn model + Physical Activity: Genopets Raises $8.3m in Seed Round Funding to “bridge the physical and digital world. What is it?
It sits at the intersection of gaming, play-to-earn, and physical activity. This platform connects a gamer’s real-world steps with their progression, customization, and value creation in the Genopet universe.
When reading Genopets’ whitepaper, I was struck by its “big why” (mission) of recognizing, embracing, and evolving who we are.
The details (i.e. the “genoverse” game elements, its economic flywheel, and much else) remain unclear to me but I will explore this more in future editions.
"Non-invasive" Glucose Monitoring: BlueSemi (Google-backed healthtech startup) raises $69M ahead of an IPO.
Decentralized Clinical Trials: Medable Secures $304M at $2.1B Valuation for Decentralized Clinical Trials Platform. These trials can expand diversity and improve participation rates, similar to Lightship, which we covered in edition 11.
Patients need the life sciences industry to continue innovating at this pace. By working at the intersection of speed, safety and science, we believe we can meaningfully reduce the barriers to drug development – and ultimately, enable more effective therapies for people all over the world.”
#4 🏥 Healthcare - startup emerging out of stealth
Consumers’ desires to receive services in the comforts of home have increased.
Nearly nine in ten adults (86%) say they would prefer to receive post-hospital short-term health care at home, while 5% say they would prefer to receive care in a nursing home.
Patina’s care model allows seniors access to teams both in-home and virtually.
It includes a wide-ranging team across specialties, including a PCP, nurse practitioner, behavioral health provider, chronic care specialists, pharmacists, and geriatricians.
Here’s some more info on Patina. From looking into their leadership team, values, and how they aspire to provide high-quality care, I expect to be covering them and the outcomes they deliver down the road.
Weekly Musings
#5🎙️ Podcast of the Week
Listen to Keith Rumjahn discuss building the fitness metaverse.
Who is it: Keith Rumjahn, CEO of OliveX, a digital health & fitness company that delivers unique user experiences through fitness gamification, augmented reality, and play-to-earn experiences.
This is the first “move-for-reward” style game that takes an approach similar to Pokémon Go, combining their mobile app with map routes, different missions, and bounties.
Pros & cons: This type of app is geared towards a wider range of people (non-hardcore runners), and I remain optimistic that tech like this can bring new people into fitness. On the flip side, I’ve experienced the pure, redeeming qualifies of being outdoors, clearing your mind on a run, and think there’s something pure about it that this doesn’t provide.
Learn more: He’ll be speaking at the Fit Tech Summit next week!
#6 💥 Spark Moment of the Week
This week’s spark moment is simple and from January 1st, 2021.
It was a defining coffee, meal, and overdue catch-up with a friend that helped me realize what I’m most interested in and led me to send out edition #13 today.
I had a longer moment written, but I’m refining the writing for edition #14, so in a last-ditch effort, I quickly wrote this blurb about a friend who I was inspired by when grabbing coffee and a lunch earlier in the year..
1/1/21 Daily Moment: Got coffee and pizza with Brady. Inspired me to think bigger, to plan ahead, and to have chutzpah to embrace uniqueness and take risks. Realized that a niche I’m fascinated in and want to explore is health, general wellness, fitness, and how these 3 areas collide with technology. Wearables and tech to improve the lives of humanity.
Call to action: who’s 1 friend who inspired you? Why not let them know?
#7 ✨Endnote
Saks’ Snacks was brought to you by the Fit Tech Summit this week. Which by the way… all readers get a 100% VIP code off. See below for more details.
The world of fitness and health is accelerating into a new era. Why should these industries embrace tech? International visionaries (including Freeletics, Runtastic, FemTech Lab, IBM, Microsoft) will answer on Nov 8-9, 2021.
The summit will bring together visionaries in a live stream. Under the motto "Embrace Technology or Die Out" they will be talking about topics such as:
⛓ Blockchain for fitness, 🏋️♀️ FemFitTech, 📲 Entry of tech giants into healthcare
If interested: as a sign of appreciation for being part of the Saks Snacks community, Natalia & the summit were gracious enough to give you a 100% discount on paid tickets. You can register here in 60 seconds and redeem this discount code: FitTech_SaksSnacks_VIP
Calls to action
Forward Saks Snacks to someone who may enjoy it!
Follow along on Twitter where I share quicker updates more frequently
Sign up for more fitness x technology fun at the summit in 2 days!
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Have a creative week,
Adam