Tag: health tech

  • This Revolutionary 1-Hour Full Body Scan Could Save Your Life

    This Revolutionary 1-Hour Full Body Scan Could Save Your Life

    I woke up at 3:30 in the morning in a total panic. It was the morning after I had received a full body scan from Prenuvo—the makers of the world’s most advanced whole body health scanner—and I couldn’t stop obsessing over the possibility of the scan picking something up bad. Could those stomach aches I’ve been having recently be from a tumor and not all the trains, planes, and automobiles, I’ve been on and off of, or the lack of hydration or eating normally I’ve been doing? No, it was the latter. How about those headaches? Is it an aneurysm? No, that’s the caffeine withdrawal. But it didn’t stop my mind from catastrophizing.

    Getting a scan was scary as hell… and then it wasn’t.

    Taking a proactive approach

    Originally I was excited about the opportunity of this story, the idea, the technology, and I didn’t think about how I was actually putting myself through something very real and potentially life-changing. One of the most powerful devices on the planet would be identifying every little kink in my armor. Specifically, Prenuvo’s scanner has the ability to detect over 500 conditions, including most solid tumors at stage 1, aneurysms, cysts, and more.

    Truth is, for as scary as it was, proactive healthcare makes a lot of sense. Prenuvo has been able to alert 1 in 20 people to a life-saving diagnosis so far. If I can find something early and get it taken care of, that’s better than finding out when it’s too late. I guess it’s a lot like eating well, sleeping well, and working out religiously. If I can mitigate declines and risk, I’m going to do it.

    Andrew Lacy, the CEO and founder of Prenuvo, likens it to dentistry: “We understand that if we go [to the dentist] routinely, it’s not going to stop us from having the need for a filling to be done every once in a while, but the likelihood of a root canal goes down significantly—Prenuvo wants to apply that same model to the rest of the body,” he says. As we age, we will have things that go wrong with us, but if we are looking routinely, then we are going to catch those things a lot earlier. Then, Lacy says, you can, more often than not, modify your lifestyle in order to avoid a health condition developing to a stage where you need medical intervention.

    Related: The perfect day for brain and body performance

    Changing how we think about disease

    Because of our current healthcare system that tends to catch disease late, Lacy says many of us (guilty) have a tremendous negative connotation around the whole idea of disease, because disease automatically implies something horrible. “I would like to, through this company, hopefully change the definition of disease for our members,” he says. “ For me, disease means maintenance, early detection, lifestyle interventions, inexpensive, high likelihood of success,” he continues, adding that for folks that come in routinely, that’s how they think about their health.

    If we look at cancers, for example, Lacy says that people don’t typically realize that, although all cancers are different and they all grow differently in different people with different ethnicities or genetics, in general they grow a lot slower than you think. “And so we believe that there’s a detection window of around three years to catch that cancer still at stage one,” he says.

    Related: How to get better sleep at night

    Improving healthspan

    Outside of detecting a major disease like cancer early, Prenuvo also monitors seemingly more minor issues. Take, for example, spine curvature, something Lacy himself has been keeping an eye on. Bi-yearly Prenuvo scans showed him that his spine changes a lot in times of high stress. And he’s not alone: “When we image the spines of people in Silicon Valley, in particular young people, and if I show that spine to a radiologist and ask them to guess the age of the person, they’ll be out by 15 to 20 years,” Lacy says, adding that they see people in their twenties that have the spine of a 40-year-old.

    Related: The over-40 workout plan to build lean muscle

    It makes sense when you consider that every innovation out of Silicon Valley is all about reducing mobility—you can turn your lights on and off and order dinner with your phone. “So there’s this epidemic, we believe, that’s coming down the road,” he says. “It’s going to be a big problem in 20 or 30 years, as these folks reach their fifties and sixties. So we have to really fight this if we’re going to be healthy in our older age.”

    Lacy himself is fighting back with movement—walking between six and 12 miles on a treadmill desk daily, specifically—and he’s seen the positive effects on the curvature of his spine in his scans. “One of the single biggest determinants of longevity is mobility,” he says. “What we do in our thirties and forties affects our mobility in our sixties and seventies, and it’s not the intensity of the exercise.”

    Related: The mobility routine to do every night

    Making the tech accessible to all

    That said, healthcare is a delicate topic. It can be confusing, frustrating, and quite frankly, costly. I brought this up with Lacy after several comments on social media along those same lines, and he made a few interesting points. First, he mentions that the company is diligently expanding its scale to incorporate new technologies like AI, with the goal of reducing costs. These savings would then be passed on to consumers, making the scanning service more widely accessible.

    They’ve already accomplished that to some degree: “When we started Prenuvo, the closest thing to what we’re doing cost $30,000,” he says, explaining that people with a high cancer risk could get one of these scans in exchange for a $50,000 bill to their insurance company. “So $2,500 or $1000, if we’re just looking for cancer in the torso, is significantly cheaper than the existing alternatives,” Lacy says, adding that the ultimate price needs to be even cheaper than what it is today.

    Part of how they’ve been able to do this is through building their own hardware that is customized to whole-body screening. “We’ve spent a lot of time optimizing the screening and the software protocols, and we’re doing a lot of research [on] how AI can help accelerate both the speed and the accuracy of the scan,” Lacy explains. “And that enables us to do a clinical diagnostic quality scan in 55 minutes that used to take three or four hours.”

    The bottom line

    “We fundamentally believe that if everyone in the US was doing one of these scans, not only would we save millions of lives, but we would be a healthier country and our health system would be much smaller than it is today,” he says.

    Keep reading to learn more about my personal experience with Prenuvo, plus more from the interview with Lacy.

    The Process of Getting a Full Body Prenuvo Scan

    Booking my appointment on prenuvo.com was straightforward. I picked my location and selected a convenient time slot. (Note: If you’re intrigued by the prospect of getting a scan, you can use this special code for a $300 discount. Prenuvo generously provided this discount for our readers. We did not receive payment for this story, our posts, or for sharing this code. Book a scan at prenuvo.com/humanfitproject or for phone appointments mention humanfitproject)

    Before my appointment, I needed to fast for 4 hours, although I could have coffee or tea up to 2 hours before the scan.

    Upon arrival, I was quickly brought back into a private changing room, where I changed into scrubs, removed all metal and jewelry, and securely stored my belongings.

    Soon after, a technician guided me into the room housing the scanner. After ensuring I wasn’t wearing any jewelry and that I felt comfortable, he briefed me on the procedure. I would need to stay completely still, follow some occasional breathing instructions from the machine, and endure a somewhat constricted space. He reassured me that he’d be speaking to me throughout the process, that I could watch a Netflix show to distract myself, and that overall, I’d be just fine.

    Most of the time I was just lying still, but the scan did involve a few simple breath-holding exercises to enable the machine to examine my lungs.

    After 45-50 minutes, the scan concluded, entirely painless. Yes, the tube felt tight, and I had an initial moment of anxiety, but focusing on my breathing and listening to the technician’s voice soon helped me settle.

    Post-scan, I received instructions about the next steps. I was told to expect an email within 5-10 business days containing my results, although I ended up receiving it the next day—a huge relief.

    The email directed me to my online account where I could review the findings. They were organized by body system and came with helpful notes, deep dives into the results, and additional FAQs. My report fell into three categories: no adverse findings, informational findings, and minor findings. I could view all the images, a written report, and a copy of the report sent to my primary care physician.

    Soon after the email arrived, Prenuvo called to schedule a consultation with a nurse practitioner to discuss my results and answer any questions. This conversation was helpful in putting the results into context and providing further insights. For example, my nurse reassured me I was in very good health and that I’d clearly been taking good care of myself. A finding that did come up was a mild bulged disc in my neck, which has been bothering me for quite some time, and I did suspect something. She recommended I see a physical therapist, which I have and have been managing.

    Prenuvo recommends getting a scan every 12 months as a proactive health measure. It’s a commitment I’m seriously considering. After all, when it comes to health, proactive beats reactive every time.

    Again, if you’re interested in getting a scan, you can use this special code for a $300 discount. Prenuvo generously provided this discount for our readers. And to reiterate, we did not receive payment for this story, our posts, or for sharing this code. Book a scan at prenuvo.com/humanfitproject or for phone appointments mention humanfitproject)

    More from the interview with Andrew Lacy, CEO and Founder of Prenuvo

    *This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and concision.

    How did you get started on Prenuvo?

    In 2018, I had something of a midlife crisis. I’m a serial entrepreneur. I work way too hard. I slept nowhere near enough, and I still had energy in me for another startup. And I started to look really intently in the field of medicine. I really started building the company because I felt like it provided me with an answer to the question, “Am I generally okay right now?” Because I felt like the worst possible thing would be to work really hard to hopefully build for a better future, and not necessarily be around for that future. And so I tried to get an answer to that question and I couldn’t find it anywhere. There were bits and pieces. I did blood tests and colonoscopies and genetic tests. I got a little patchwork of answers, but there was no real comprehensive answer, until I discovered the founding radiologist of Prenuvo, who had been doing these scans in Vancouver, Canada. I went and did a scan. I learned more about my life than had been told to me by the medical system, and frankly just felt like I had seen the future of medicine. And from that day on, it was my mission to really bring this to as many people as possible.

    This one is from one of our readers: How many false positives are being detected that lead to unnecessary medical interventions and how patient mortality is affected by this ‘proactive’ approach?

    First of all, there’s just a semantic point to make, which is, we don’t necessarily diagnose cancer, we stratify the risk of our imaging findings. So when we see something, for example, in your liver, we will say, “Hey, it’s at the benign end of the spectrum. Don’t do anything about it” or “This is concerning and you need to actually do something about it.”

    All imaging has false positives. The question is, how do we reduce or minimize the effect of false positives in our scan? The first is the technique I mentioned, multiparametric MRI with diffusion weighted imaging imaging, a technique called diffusion. This enables us to be a lot more precise about what we’re seeing. So not only will we see a lesion, like a diagnostic MRI, but we have this morphological data about exactly what is that tissue there, so that we can more precisely segment the benign lesions from the lesions that have features that are more concerning.

    The second thing that reduces false positives is the way in which we handle indeterminate findings. We are constantly screening and stratifying risk to determine whether something can be clinically significant or not. The vast majority of things that we can’t fully classify into either benign or concerning, are small. And because they’re small, oftentimes the follow-up course of action is measuring change over time between this scan and when you come in for your next scan. And either that will have not grown at all, in which case we know it’s benign, or it will have grown into something that is benign, or it will have turned into something that’s more concerning, and we then do a follow-up test. And that’s an alternative to a biopsy that historically might carry a certain level of risk.

    Would Prenuvo seek partnerships with health insurers and healthcare providers? How does Prenuvo navigate the current healthcare system, which is primarily based on treating illness rather than preventing it?

    We’re having some success with employers and the insurance companies that administer employer funded plans, so that’s probably for big forward-looking enterprises that want to provide this as a benefit for their employees. And that’s probably the first opportunity we have to really interact with insurance companies and have them understand exactly what it is that we do. And we hope, through those relationships, we’ll be able to explore offering regular health plans offered by those insurers.

    What are some other future plans for the company that our readers might be interested in hearing?

    An area that we are excited about is AI research we have been doing around quantifying a person’s health trajectory by looking at every organ in the body and then defining what is a “normal aging process.” As we age, all of us, our bodies degenerate to some greater or lesser extent. And our brain starts to shrink, our spine becomes more problematic, our liver changes, our kidneys change, and we start to lose muscle. And what’s really unique about Prenuvo is the vast majority of our members are healthier. They have disease, but they have early stages of disease. They have age related degeneration, but they have earlier stages of that degeneration. And as we scan more and more people, we can start developing almost like an average curve of organ aging from the brain to the liver. And what we hope to be able to do over time, as we measure you from one year to the next, is we’ll say, “Okay, well the average person in your age bracket, their muscle is shrinking 3% a decade, but your muscle’s only shrinking 1% a decade,” or “Your muscle’s not shrinking at all. Whatever you’re doing in keeping it up, keep it up.” If it’s shrinking at the average, how can we, through diet, exercise, through other lifestyle modifications, work to slow down that age related degeneration? And for me, that’s the most exciting thing that we’re working on, to be able to really give you very, very precise and detailed measurements about your health trajectory. We have actually published breakthrough research at top medical conferences around brain health and its connection to our lifestyle, which was led by our AI research and medical teams.

    Will it always be Prenuvo and Prenuvo staff handling scans or will you sell equipment to doctors and practices?

    This is an area we’re excited about and are exploring in different parts of the world with partners who share our philosophy around preventative health. We are constantly getting emails about people from all over the world wanting to get a scan in their country. At the same time, we want to make this technology as available and accessible as possible.

    Again, if you’re interested in getting a scan, you can use this special code for a $300 discount. Prenuvo generously provided this discount for our readers. And to reiterate, we did not receive payment for this story, our posts, or for sharing this code. Book a scan at prenuvo.com/humanfitproject or for phone appointments mention humanfitproject)

    —

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  • The 7-day Spire Health Tag experiment

    The 7-day Spire Health Tag experiment

    This is Spire’s Health Tag. Over the next week we’ll be testing it out because it seems quite different than most wearables, both in what it offers and how you actually wear it.

    According to Jonathan Palley, the CEO and co-founder of Spire, Health Tag is the first product that collects data on all aspects of your day. The basics of what you might find in an activity tracker like heart rate, calories burned, or steps taken are there, along with sleep monitoring, but what’s more interesting is that it can detect whether you’re stressed, calm, or focused. “It’s not designed as a fitness product, it’s more holistic,” he says.

    To get the mind tracking data, Health Tag has a respiratory sensor that measures our thoracic expansions and breathing patterns. The device (or devices) will then sync that real-time flow of data to the Spire app on your phone and will send you you notifications to let you if something is off. For example: If your breathing is becoming tense, or you haven’t taken a good deep breath in a while, the Spire app will notify you. There’s also a tool within the app that will train you to slow your breathing. If all is good, the app won’t bother you.

    In addition to being a holistic tracker, Palley refers to Health Tag as a “headless device” because it was purposely made to be invisible. “Data is great because of the data, not the device, “ he says. Instead of worrying about taking a wearable off to charge and putting it back on (or even have it flow with a particular outfit), Health Tags adhere to the inside of your clothing and you can simply go about your life.

    If you just want to really simply track your heart rate and steps, then stick them on workout clothes only. If you’re more interested sleep, just put it on your PJs. If you want your work week insights on stress and focus, then put it on a bra or waistband of underwear. “Where you put it depends on what you want to achieve with it,” says Palley.

    The Health Tag devices come as a single unit, or in packs of 3 or 8. They are machine and dryer-friendly, and the batteries can last up about a year and a half. The single unit sells for $49, a 3-pack goes for $129, and the 8-pack is $299. There’s also an option for a Spire+ membership for $10 per month which gets you free replacement batteries, 50% discounts on extra tags, and personalized health reports.

    Don’t miss our posts. Follow us on Instagram (@humanfitproject).

    SETTING UP THE SPIRE HEALTH TAGS

    The set up is pretty straight-forward. You download the Spire app and create an account. You put in all of the basic information you’d expect including your height, weight, age, and sex. From there you’ll “pair” one of the tags by placing it next to your phone, and the remaining tags in your pack will automatically sync. Then you can watch a demo about how to apply them onto your clothes. Hint: it’s on the front of your waistband slightly off of center. To keep track of which tag is on which garment, you can edit the names of the tags within the Spire app by tapping “Settings” and then “Devices”.

    When you tap “LiveInsights”, you can select what types of notifications you want which include: “Reduce Stress”, “Tense Aware”, “Take a Breather”, “Sleep Better”, “Start a Sleep Routine”, “Activity Journal”, and “Get a Move On”.

    The Spire app suggests you give the tags 1-3 days of regular wear for the algorithms to calibrate correctly.

    The company says there will be an app update this week to include integration into Apple HealthKit.

    THE 7-DAY SPIRE HEALTH TAG EXPERIMENT

    Over the next 7 days, this portion of the article will be updated regularly to report back on what it’s been like testing and acquiring personal health data. It doesn’t matter if it’s a positive or negative report, you’ll get the honest feedback here.

    CALIBRATION PERIOD – Tuesday, December 4th

    I’ve received quite a few notifications about my breathing becoming tense. In some of those instances I was absolutely a bit stressed out or worked up, but there were also a couple times where I felt pretty calm. I also received a notification to let me know I hadn’t taken a deep breath in 45 minutes. I like both of these notifications very much as I’m not exactly the best at taking a moment to think about my breathing or take a deep breath. When I did stop a second to focus on my breath, I calmed down, which was to be expected. As for the times I was getting false alarms, I can’t judge it yet as I’m still within the 1-3 days calibration period that the company suggests.

    CALIBRATION PERIOD – Wednesday, December 5th

    I had a very similar experience this day as the first, I received a lot of notifications that my breathing was tense. Similar to the first day’s experience, sometimes I was definitely stressed, but other times I was pretty calm. I’m still giving it the benefit of the doubt as it’s still within the calibration period.

    This was also the first day I received data about my sleep and it seems pretty accurate to me. I had trouble falling asleep early on and didn’t wake up in the middle of the night. The app data confirmed this. I got just about 8 hours of sleep, then was lucky enough to get an afternoon cat nap for an hour and half which the app also clearly captured. It showed a lot of deep sleep during that nap and I’ll have to admit, I did feel like I was out cold.

    One particular thing that I really liked was the tool to help slow and deepen my breathing. Even though I was calm and relaxed in bed, I opened the app and tapped the little green bubbles in the top right hand corner. The app instructed me to breathe deeply and slowly. While I was doing this a big batch of grey and green bubbles seemed to be mirroring my breathing pattern. It felt pretty close. I think it’s possible this may have helped me nod off to sleep a little easier.

    CALIBRATION PERIOD – Thursday, December 6th

    I woke up to a small surprise this morning. When I checked my phone I had received an alert at 11:45PM that I had been sedentary for more than 45 minutes. If that happened during the day, or any time before 11PM, I would understand. The problem is, I had a bedtime goal of 11PM and I was laying down trying to sleep. Since we’re still in the in the calibration period, it gets a pass.

    Around 11AM this morning I did a fairly intense bodyweight workout with some intervals of running in place/high knees. The app did know when I was moving and when I was taking rests, which was pretty cool. I’m still trying to understand the breathing monitor in the bottom right, but that also did show an increase in breaths per minute as I progressed through the workout. The only thing I noticed that seemed a bit off was my heart rate. It seemed to have a small delay in picking up when my heart rate started to get going—I was hanging around the 60 bmp range for a bit. Then, to my surprise, it started registering my heart rate into the 180 bmp mark at one point. I was working out pretty hard, but I think a reading of 180 was a bit aggressive.

    Throughout the day I did also continue to get some notifications that my breathing was becoming tense, again, sometimes I think it was warranted where others, not so much. Unless I really am that freaking high strung and don’t even realize it. 🙂

    DAY 1 – Friday, December 7th

    I woke up in the middle of the night for about 30 minutes because of some congestion in my nose and throat. After I had fallen back asleep and got back up again around my normal time, I noticed that the app had picked that up that sleep disruption perfectly.

    The app also did a spot-on job with picking up my tense breathing from some stress I was experiencing late Thursday night. It was the kind of stress that hung around and there wasn’t much I could do to chill out so they app kept firing multiple notifications that my breathing was tense. I was impressed by this.

    After this mornings workout I got a notification to “congratulate” for a job well done. It registered a 10-minute workout, but in actuality it was more like a 60-minute workout. I got a similar notification yesterday for my 30-minute workout, but todays workout and yesterdays workout were very different. Yesterday I really got my heart pounding with cardio intervals, today was weight training and my breathing stayed very focused. The app registers anything that gets your heart rate up as a workout, for example, my walk downtown which was about 3.5 miles and took about 45 minutes, was registered. That 10-minutes that it picked up from this morning was a period where I did a small circuit to warm-up. This makes sense. Tracking weight training would be difficult. But, again, the company did not design this as a fitness product, it’s a wellness/holistic product.

    The “calibration period” is over, so I’m curious to see if I get less notifications about my breath being tense when I actually feel calm. Stay tuned.

    DAY 2 – Saturday, December 8th

    I finally washed some of my gear that was tagged. I was curious to see how the adhesive would last through the first wash and dry cycle. I did as instructed and waited a couple days to put them through. The good new is, the tag didn’t come off. The bad new is, it seems like it’s starting to. While Spire does provide some extra adhesive strips, I wasn’t exactly looking forward to replacing them so soon. I like the idea of this being a wearable that I completely forget about. Replacing adhesive strips is not forgettable. However, two other pieces of clothing that I washed didn’t seem to have any problem, the adhesive held perfectly.

    Given it was Saturday, I thought that it was also very interesting that the number of times I received notifications about my breathing “becoming tense” was way less frequent than the work week. Coincidence that my breathing was calmer on a Saturday? What else was interesting was that when I did get notifications they were when I started to do work stuff. Nice, Spire. I’ve come to appreciate these gentle reminders that my body is getting tense. It’s just a little tap that says, “Hey, Mike. Chill for a minute.”

    I was sitting on the couch and started to play with the respiratory sensor some more. I looked up the average amount of breaths per minute and it turned out to be between 16-20. I thought it would be fun to see how low I could get myself by taking big deep breaths with long, drawn out exhales. I was impressed with just how well the real-time readings were with the “wave” that would go up and down. I got as low as 4 breaths per minute for the fun of it, but for the most part I’m right in that normal range, lower in the early morning and late evenings when I’m really chilled.

    DAY 3 – Sunday, December 9th

    I’m really enjoying the sleep tracking. It’s cool to see how much light sleep, REM sleep, and deep sleep I’m getting. It’s also interesting to see that the connection between the amount of REM and deep sleep I get when it’s after a serious workout. I’ve had a couple really great workouts lately and my sleep has been long and deep. Before that when I was doing a bit more active recovery or lower impact stuff, my sleep wasn’t has heavy. I’m not obsessing over it, but it’s been nice to be able see.

    While I understand the product isn’t really an activity tracker, I do like that the data is still being captured. It’s incredible how much more I walk when I’m in NYC vs being down by the beach. When I’m in the city I walk every single place I go and the steps and mileage quickly add up, whereas down the beach, I’ve got to drive significantly more.

    DAY 4, 5, 6, & 7 – Monday, December 10th – Thursday, December 13th

    Over the four final days of the seven day test, I didn’t put too much thought into my Health Tag, I guess that’s the point to some extent. The routine I’ve gotten into was this: In the morning, I’ll wake up and check the app for my sleep and try to make sense of it (Did I not sleep well because I’ve been thinking too much? Did I sleep a ton because I worked out way too hard? Why do I think my sleep got disturbed? Was it too hot in my room?) During the day I’ll listen to the reminders to take a deep breath when I haven’t taken one in a while. At night, I’ll use the respiratory sensor to do some slow breathing like I mentioned in Day 2. That has been helpful for getting me ready for bed.

    FINAL THOUGHTS

    After several washes now, the tags have remained stuck on. That’s good. I was a little nervous.

    The respiratory sensor is helpful. I feel it might slightly overcall the tense breathing, but it seems to work very well with the guided breathing tool. Hard to say for sure, but better to be aware than unaware, I guess. It’s a “calm down” notification.

    The sleep tracking is great. I loved looking back to see how many hours of REM sleep I’d get, especially after very long surf sessions. Or around stressful days. Sometimes I have interrupted sleep, other times I don’t, but there are patterns. It’s nice to know.

    Activity tracking and the heart rate monitor are exactly what you’ve seen on other wearables. And that’s totally fine. It’s not so much about that. It’s about the breathing. The heart rate monitor may put up higher than usual beats per minute, when working out, but it seems on-point when at rest.

    All in all, it does give you some valuable data, and you can put it on and forget about it for the most part. Mine are staying on, for now. I’ll let you know otherwise.

    Editorial disclosure: This is not a sponsored post. HFP has not received any compensation for this coverage or review.