South Africa’s health informatics firm LifeQ has teamed up with Nasdaq-listed Analog Devices to improve effectiveness of body monitoring devices in health management.
LifeQ has set out to catalyze a change in how we understand and optimize our health. Championed by computational systems biologists, LifeQ sees the human body as the ultimate sensor.
Tapping into this, LifeQ provides people with the information required to live intelligently today, and, in the future predict changes in personal physiology and health.
The two firms plan to design sensors that enable personalized, continuous and accurate tracking of physiological parameters such as heart rate, sleep phases, sleep quality, blood lactate, 24-hour calorie intake as well as stress markers such as salivary cortisol.
Monitoring this type of data can increase early detection of emergency conditions and diseases in at-risk patients.
“LifeQ’s collaboration with ADI will enable sensor solutions that meet a higher and wider standard, including new industry benchmarks such as the latest Android Wear requirements,” said Riaan Conradie, co-founder and chief operating officer, LifeQ.
“Our goal is to deliver high-value physiological data to ecosystem partners who are serving consumer lifestyle, corporate wellness and health insurance markets.”
With its world leading computational systems biology expertise, LifeQ ensures a unique approach to the construction and acquisition of information from bio-sensors. Combined with the patented LifeQ bio-mathematical engine, a range of physiological measures that are currently inaccessible, costly and invasive are now available both through wearable devices and via LifeQ’s API.
“The development of smart wearable sensors is essential to supercharge the next generation of non-invasive body monitoring solutions. ADI offers the semiconductor expertise and LifeQ provides the bio-mathematical understanding needed to develop sensors that can make body monitoring devices even more effective in preventing, predicting and managing diseases,” James Doscher, general manager, Industrial and Business Healthcare Group, Analog Devices, said in a statement.
“This, in turn, will impact how doctors and patients share information, interact, and make decisions about patient care. Patients can have greater access to vital data about their own bodies and be more involved in their overall health and wellness.”
LifeQ was co-founded by Dr. Riaan Conradie, Laurie Olivier, Franco du Preez and Kora Holm.
Riaan has first-hand experience of the impact of disease (as a young boy Riaan lost his eye to retinoblastoma). Soon after completing his PhD, Riaan realized that by combining his specialist knowledge in Computational Systems Biology with his entrepreneurial spirit there was an opportunity to make a real difference in how the world managed health.
Laurence (Laurie) is a seasoned investor and entrepreneur, and have served on the boards of more than 40 startup and major companies (including public) in the Americas, EMEA and East Asia.
Franco is a renowned system biologist, with a passion for applying computation systems biology to complex real-world problems that influence human health and well-being.
Kora, a scientist trained in the field of Molecular Genetics, combines her analytical skills, pragmatic approach and practical nature to drive troubleshooting and research endeavors at LifeQ.
LifeQ’s technology focuses on highlighting and improving six major verticals in one technological device for users to optimize their health and well-being.
- Fitness: Improve efficiency and effectiveness of training and recovery by providing continuous information usually only available periodically in an advanced training or sports science environment.
- Nutrition: The ability to measure both calorie burn and, in time, calorie uptake that will provide the first ever automatic monitor of energy balance.
- Sleep & Stress: Generating scientifically valid sleep and stress information to enable a deep understanding of our emotional health and how this is impacted by the lives we live.
- Medical: Opening up a range of key medical metrics and predictive tools to improve the quality and reduce the costs of medical care.
- Health: Combining the fitness, nutrition, sleep, stress and medical information to provide an indepth understanding of our total health.
- Data Mining: An all-encompassing vertical that clusters all elements together to collect vast amounts of data, which will enable population level analysis and research that, was previously impossible.
LifeQ’s goal is to create a continuous, on demand record and model of personal physiology that will enable wearable device companies, application developers, data scientists, researchers, health experts and of course individuals to better monitor and understand health. There are a huge range of applications of this information, including: fitness, nutrition, sleep, stress, medical, health, and population level data research.
