Saks Snacks #4: Virtual Reality Fitness, Healthcare Innovation, July 4, 2021
Virtual reality fitness, Healthcare innovation, personalized medicine, the fight has begun (another connected fitness boxing raise), and more
Happy 4th from San Francisco! Take a look below at the specific topics explored and read what interests you most.
🥑 Snacks of the Week - skimmable intros to my top 3 reads of the week
📡 Capital Raise - a healthcare business that is an early domino in the revolution we’ll observe + another connected fitness boxing business
🏥 Healthcare *NEW* - I expect this to be a recurring section as we pioneer the golden age of precision, personalized medicine over the next decade.
👨💻“Wearable of the Week”: Virtual Reality & Augmented Reality
🤠 Weekly Musings
🎙️ 1 VR podcast
💥 1 spark moment from a dear friend
#1 🥑 Snacks of the Week
I heard you - you’re in a pinch for time! Each edition will start with top reads (snacks) before other in-depth emerging health tech trends (the meals).
Consumer Health 1st, Healthcare 2nd? Apple’s plan to Reimagine Healthcare
US healthcare spend will top $4T this year, jumping to $6.9T by 2028.
Apple aims to create a new healthcare paradigm by combining telehealth services, remote monitoring, and in-person visits
“I really believe that if you zoom out to the future and then look back and ask, ‘What has Apple’s greatest contribution been?’ it will be in the health and wellness area.” - Tim Cook, Apple CEO
CGM’s use for non-diabetics: Peter Attia, M.D. defends his argument that CGMs are the best behavioral tool available and are useful for non-diabetics
How AI Will Transform Medicine: The same way it transformed chess.
“A.I. will not put healthcare professionals out of their jobs, but those doctors who don’t use A.I. will be replaced by those who do. Just like chess took a new dimension with A.I., a similar scenario is likely to unfold in the field of medicine. Rather than a competition, the technology should be seen as cooperation that amplifies human performance.
#2 📡 Capital Raise Radar
#1: Nexhealth raises $31m to accelerate healthcare innovation by connecting patients, providers and developers. | Learn More | Read in #4: healthcare
#2: FightCamp, an interactive at-home boxing machine and workout class company, raised $90 million and features an impressive list of pro boxers (Floyd Mayweather, Mike Tyson). The recent raise will fuel international expansion, building an Android app, and a larger subscription content library. | Learn More
#3👨💻Wearable of the Week: Virtual + Augmented Reality
Virtual reality will be the next platform for the future of fitness. VR won’t be the primary source of fitness for everyone (myself included 🙋), but fitness providers can leverage it to broaden their audience. And they will. By offering an experience that transcends a workout, VR workouts can bring fitness to “non-fitness” people.
As discussed in the last edition, the demand for entertainment first, fitness second options is strong.
For the first time, people formerly unable to form habits around fitness can form these habits because these products make it feel fun and feel entirely different than previous connotations with exercise. In addition to expanding the fitness market by gamifying the experience, VR experiences can satisfy the bodybuilder who wants to supplement their routine with cardio too.
Numbers don’t lie. The VR market is expected to reach $57.55B by 2027. For reference, 2 years ago the size was $3.1B
Yes, fitness will take a piece of the growing virtual reality pie.
What does the future of VR look like? Keep your eyes out for adaptive commentary, advanced integrated heart rate data, and truly adaptive experiences via coaching, audio, and personalization that will make each end user’s workout customized to their health, recovery, and a whole lot more.
Zuck also acknowledged recently VR’s more-ranging use-cases, like fitness & virtual meetings. are more ranging than gaming.
“It’s quickly expanding beyond games… We think that this is eventually going to be a big part of the next major computing platform after phones and after PCs.… and he believes Peloton-like fitness subscriptions could become an essential part of the virtual reality experience.”
#4 🏥 Healthcare
Our current healthcare system practices sick care, not health care. Innovators like Nexhealth (mentioned in Capital Raise Radar) can accelerate our path towards a better future of personalized, proactive health care. While Nexhealth doesn’t ail the broken system itself, it’s an infrastructural step in the right direction that’ll bring more innovative solutions to the market.
Patients demand excellent care and how they engage and communicate with their providers is increasingly important. NexHealth’s integrated solution provides a better patient experience and helps doctors with better practice management systems by integrating with a wide selection of electronic health record systems.
For the first time in human history, we can continuously track subtle signals that get missed in clinical practice. Business model innovations and integrations are part of what’s needed to shift our care from intermittent data monitoring to continuous capturing from your smartwatch band, internet of things home, etc.
I liked Packy McCormick’s term for these types of businesses: “world-builders”.
“Worldbuilders zoom out, see things others don’t, and devise counterintuitive plans to achieve massive goals over a very long time. They have three characteristics:
Predict something non-obvious about the way the world is moving before others see it and before the market is ready for their ultimate vision.
Create a wedge into the market and leverage it into a much larger opportunity. The public often ridicules or dismisses the initial wedge product.
They timestamp their vision, whether in public announcements or confidential documents.
To provide reliable, continuous medical care, any world-builder will need to provide a complete medical record with interoperability.
Interoperability in healthcare enables different information technology systems to communicate and exchange usable data. This allows providers to have access to all data for a patient being treated.
This is a simplified definition of healthcare interoperability, but the definition is important to understand how one software application can build on top of the functionality and data of another application, and what rules/standards would get in the way. While the solutions that will help us get to a true “healthcare” model are in ideation, I know that API’s similar to Nexhealth will fuel better care.
#5 Weekly Musings
🎙️ Podcast of the Week
Podcast #1 - Learn more from Sam Cole, CEO of FitXr, a virtual reality fitness platform and the leading developer of VR fitness.
💥 Spark Moment of the Week
I got the chance to catch up with my close friend Meghan last week in San Francisco, just 11 days after she had contributed to a spark moment of my day, the previous Thursday (she didn’t know this)!
She concluded her first year as a Teach for America teacher. We’d caught up throughout the year, and her dedication, service, and positive impact on her classroom were always something I found commendable.
For privacy’s sake from this moment in late 2020, let’s refer to her student as John.
10/24/2020 Daily Moment entry:
“Profound story I want to remember: Many students in MK's Teach for America classroom are fidgety and have attention issues. One day, John whispered to Meghan, "Miss Kennedy, can you be meaner to me? I really really want to be good, but sometimes I don't know how to". This reminded me that fundamentally, we all want to be good. For some more than others, it's tougher to make these decisions. Kids don't have the tools yet (self control, self knowledge, etc.) to make these decisions but it’s of crucial importance of teachers, parents, role models, etc. to bridge these gaps to give them the tools.”
Last week, I asked Meghan how a year of teaching has influenced her communication, instincts, etc. and her response fascinated me. She recounted handling dangerous fireworks/poppers with a rambunctious 7-year old the previous weekend, and how she was able to calmly convey instructions to the kid.
She explained a MVPT framework (Movement, Voice, Participation, Time) of how to best handle children. Frankly, I realized this model can be applied in my own work when setting deadlines and communicating clearly with anyone.
The deadline a client had missed? Could have set the time / due date more clearly.
The disengaged member of any project or happening? Could have given them something to participate in.
I’m thankful I was at a red light when she shared that so I could jot it down.
Life is in the little moments.
Call to action: What detail can you appreciate about a friend, loved one, interaction, or the mundane today? How can you capture it exactly as it is? What is 1 detail from today, yesterday, recent event that you want to cherish and why?
I dare you to share 1 of your spark moments in the comments below.
👋 Endnote & Calls to action
Thanks for reading! As always, I welcome all feedback and hope to hear from you.
👇🏼 Calls to action
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Adiós and have a great 4th of July weekend,
Adam Saks