Live Healthy

Helping people with type 2 Diabetes Live longer and healthier through mobile, voice control and VR

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Background

Diabetic patients need to constantly keep their exercise up, make good food choices and keep their stress level low in order to increase their lifespan and quality of life. This is challenging as often the time and the right food choices like swapping fruit juices for whole fruit or water are difficult to make without monitoring and reminders. What if they had access to system that could speak to them via a headset on a mobile phone to remind them when to exercise and suggest easy to do 10 minute exercises based on their abilities that don’t require equipment, remind them to eat healthy snacks and offer advice on what to eat and switch out through a voice driven Alexa like interface. The last component is lowering blood pressure by stress reduction using an interactive virtual meditative experience with comfort based surroundings in via a VR headset like oculus that can also be controlled via voice or handheld controllers.

Impact

This app is for everyone with diabetes and pre-diabetes, caregivers and family members, basically anyone who will wishes to help the patient keep on track with their health goals.

Patient health and fitness outcomes are improved through assisting with lifestyle change, and controlling the effects of diabetes. It provides friendly reminders, second warnings and alerts care givers when scheduled exercise, eating, meditation or medication tasks are not met. This really empowers the patient to take control of their diabetes. The system provides voice guided mini workouts that can be done anywhere and offers smart food choices and healthier alternatives even when there is a limited selection as at restaurant. It helps the patient properly plan meals and workouts and charts their progress through a simple and convenient voice driven interface. As a project manager, I have learned that almost any situation can be handled if planned for in advance, a step at a time. For the healthcare professional, it helps track the patient’s progress on fitness goals lowering the risk and therefore the cost of needing to visit the hospital or clinic and these savings can be returned to the patient in the form of lower insurance premiums.

Innovation

  1. one of the advantages of using voice is that we can usually speak much faster than we can type or click. Voice recognition in existing apps for diabetes today is limited in value or missing altogether. To ensure reliable machine understanding, the solution is to restrict the context and vocabulary to the subject matter and train the user on a few simple words and phrases.

Examples of questions that can be asked: when is my next meal, activity or medication due? how am i doing on my daily goals? What do you recommend on this menu?

  1. Instead of overloading and overwhelming the user with information, this app tells the user what is necessary. It can provide yes or no indication as to whether the chosen meal or food item is safe to eat this or that along with any alternatives or cautions.

Sustainability

  1. This will be very low cost get into the market. I will use spare time app using Unity game engine and voice APIs. I already have access to VR hardware for the meditation app and fitness app
  2. App income will come initially on advertising revenue from a free app and target the patient
  3. I would add functionality for healthcare workers to monitor, communicate and collaborate with their patients receiving alerts on unmet goals – helping them maintain their health and lowering health costs. This would involve a subscription model for the healthcare worker. This stage would include integration with devices like fitbit and blood sugar monitors.
  4. The stress relieving VR meditation app and a VR fitness gaming app will be sold separately for the Oculus and Vive, Gear VR and the ubiquitous cardboard variants.
  5. 5-year plan: Targeted revenue $1M; Exit strategy: sell to a major company.

Feasibility of Concept

  1. The equipment required is existing readily available hardware: mobile phone, bluetooth headset, possibly Amazon Echo (Alexa) or Google Home (OK Google) for voice interaction, Optical Character recognition for menu scanning, VR (Cardboard/Gear VR/Oculus/Vive for VR Meditation and fitness apps) using Unity3D for cross platform development.

Specific experience in the field – 20 plus years IT development and architecture experience covering web, mobile and VR development, 10 years in healthcare IT Project management including managing the roll out of a wireless phone patient alert monitoring system at a hospital. Have also launched a number of apps into windows phone store and led teams that placed in top 3 in a number of hackathons.

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