The conjunction of the technology and healthcare disciplines have laid the cornerstone for transformational healthcare platforms. Leveraging the right technology at the right time and for the right purpose, can conceive limitless possibilities and opportunities for both the healthcare service providers and the users of that service.
Healthcare service providers across the world have ample comprehension of these possibilities and are striving to deliver the best of their innovation to cater to the growing needs of the healthcare industry. Humanity Inc is one prominent name among these companies.
In an interview with Insights Success, Peter Ward, the Co-founder and CEO along with Michael Geer, the Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer elucidate on the current scenario within the HealthTech industry and also brief us on how the company has gained a strong foothold in the relevant market.
Below are the highlights of the interview:
Please brief our audience about Humanity Inc, its values, vision, and mission.
Humanity is an app that monitors your rate of aging and helps you understand which actions are working to slow it down or even reverse it.
Our mission is to maximize the health span of everyone on earth. In achieving this mission, we stay bound to our values:
- Help Humanity
- Open Collaboration
- Unreasonable Believers
- Radical Inclusion
- Stay Curious
By tracking key aging biomarkers (digital, blood and genetic markers) alongside the actions that users take daily, the service uses machine learning tools to highlight what’s working for people similar to them, to slow their aging for maximizing health span.
What are the prominent solutions and products, that make your company stand out from the competition?
- Track your movement, nutrition, mind, and recovery, both passively and actively, via your smart phone and wearables
- Your H Score (Humanity Score) provides you with a daily score, based on each positive action you take. Earn points for workouts, fasting, meditation, sleep tracking and more.
- Your Rate of Aging and Biological Age, are updated dynamically based on your actions you take on a daily basis, calculated by our AI algorithms.
- Monitor your digital, blood and genetic markers and learn what actions are working, based on what actions are working for others like you.
Being an experienced leader, share with us your opinion on how the adaptation of AI in the healthcare discipline has transformed the industry and what more could be expected in the near future?
AI and open data frameworks are enabling the industry to solve a variety of complete issues – such as what causes us to age, how to early detect disease, which combination of biomarkers are most closely correlated with a change in condition, or even which drugs could be repurposed to treat certain conditions. As more data opens up to federated data analysis so that we can train models on different data sets, the faster we can identify solutions to many unanswered health challenges.
In our field, AI and machine learning capabilities have helped scientists to identify which biomarkers are most closely correlated with all-cause morbidity and all-cause mortality, using digital, blood, DNA methylation markers, amongst others. Thanks to biobanks around the world that have been tracking people’s health over many years, data scientists have been able to build models by extrapolating the data across these longitudinal data sets and then blindly testing them against other data sets to validate their predictive power.
We are only now at the beginning of a huge wave of new scientific discoveries in the health industry thanks to AI and machine learning. Google’s Deepmind AI, for example cracked a 50-year-old problem of protein folding, representing a huge advance in understanding the machinery of life itself.
Taking into consideration, the current pandemic, and its impact on global economies, how are you driving your organization to sustain operations and ensuring safety of your employees at the same time?
We launched the company from the get-go, to be remote-by-design. This has enabled us to hire the top talent in each field, without having to be limited by geography. We have also invested in developing a strong company culture that is very much focused on our values, and what impact we are collectively making to help humanity live healthier for longer and increase our collective immunity.
Given the current pandemic – this sense of purpose in mission has only been amplified, given the risk of dying or being hospitalized from COVID-19 is greatly increased if your biological age is higher, or if you have any pre-existing conditions.
Thanks to the help of a variety of tools and methodologies, we have continued to remain laser focused on that mission whilst working remotely, also ensuring we keep the safety and mental health and wellbeing of our team in great shape.
What would be your advice to budding entrepreneurs who aspire to venture into the HealthTech sector?
Do it! You’ll be entering a sector that is both challenging to change but is ripe for disruption. Humanity needs more entrepreneurs working together to collectively accelerate bringing health and wellness solutions to humanity. We are at a new watershed moment, where health consciousness is the highest it has ever been, so now is the time to push forward systemic change and bring about a variety of solutions – particularly in the preventative health space.
Where do you envision your organization to be in the long run and what are your future goals?
We hope that Humanity can impact over 1 billion people, to live healthier for longer, both as active members, but also indirectly, as a result of us bringing about new insights on what’s working to slow people’s aging and keeping us healthier for longer.
