Vivametrica Media Coverage_2014

Heyyy! NICE e-bracelet You’ve Got There… SHAME If Someone Were to SUBPOENA it The data is being used in this case by the plaintiff, but its value is obvious to either side of future lawsuits. If someone is known to have objective data about their personal movement, an insurance company, for example, could subpoena the individual, or device manufacturer, or in fact any company that has access to the data, to hand it over. In this case, the information will come from analytics firm Vivametrica, which gathers sensor readings from wearables and compares them to the health of the population. The plaintiff will go through an “assessment” period wearing a Fitbit and running the numbers through Vivametrica to see how she compares to other women. The Fitbit tracks movement to an impressive degree, providing users with feedback on not only their general activity but also their sleep patterns.

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Fitbit Data Now Being Used In The Courtroom Personal injury cases are prime targets for manipulation and conjecture. How do you show that someone who’s been in a car accident can’t do their job properly, and deserves thousands of dollars in compensation? Till now lawyers have relied on doctors to observe someone for half an hour or so and give their, sometimes-biased opinion. Soon, they might also tap the wealth of quantifiable data provided by fitness trackers. A law firm in Calgary is working on the first known personal injury case that will use activity data from a Fitbit to help show the effects of an accident on their client. The young woman in question was injured in an accident four years ago. Back then, Fitbits weren’t even on the market, but given that she was a personal trainer, her lawyers at McLeod Law believe they can say with confidence that she led an active lifestyle.

Fitbit Activity Data As Evidence in Court, Wearables Serve As Personal Black Boxes

Demonstrating the impact of an accident on one's lifestyle is usually subjective and rather difficult to prove, but with detailed data available it becomes much easier to show trends.

While the data being used in this case comes from the woman’s Fitbit, it is being processed through the Vivametrica analytics platform.

The Microsoft Band: Another Step Forward For Wearables? With more than a dozen similar devices now on the market or planned for release soon (including high-end, fashionable bracelets and at least one wristband designed by a music producer and artist), the so-called “race to the wrist” is in a full frenzy. But Rick Hu, CEO of Vivametrica, a Calgary-based developer of mHealth tools, feels the healthcare industry isn’t really paying attention to the devices themselves. They're watching for the software.


Expert Witness: Data From a Fitness Tracker Could Soon Be Used as Evidence-For or Against You-In Court Vivametrica promises to bring scientific rigour to the explosion of data consumers are collecting on themselves. By comparing data from wearable trackers to other health data collected by government agencies and past medical research studies, Vivametrica’s doctors can offer a picture of how someone’s activity level compares to the general population’s. What's more, the company says it can use fitness data to make predictions of someone’s risk of developing diabetes and heart disease. That’s useful information for people looking to improve their long-term health. However, Vivametrica is initially targeting its services not at the public, but at law firms, corporate wellness programs and insurance companies. Hu says he’s hopeful the technology will help people improve their health, whether for personal satisfactions or to lower insurance premiums.

Pilot study suggests wearable devices can help alleviate back pain Vivametrica’s pilot

study, released today, finds that body mass index is the best predictor of daily function in people with LSS, suggesting that weight loss and increased physical activity may improve the condition. The study also finds that objective activity measures from wearable devices eliminate the guesswork inherent in patient feedback such as questionnaires, allowing more targeted treatment. The use of wearable devices also empowers LSS patients to be more involved in their own health and encourages them to change their behaviour. “We’re aiming at the person as a whole - lifestyle change,” says Lane. “What we’re seeing is that people are losing weight and becoming more active - but they’re also having less pain, which is huge.” In the meantime, Vivametrica is working to standardise the input and analysis of these different devices so that, as Lane puts it, “If you have a Fitbit and your friend has a Jawbone, you can both access the same analysis from Vivametrica and it will mean the same thing, and you’ll get the information back in the appropriate format for your device.”

Privacy Concerns Mount as Wearable Sensors Pop Up Everywhere Some see the flood of information as a source of potential. Start-up Vivametrica plans to take anonymized data from fitness data and try to forecast cases of health problems like diabetes or heart disease.

Wearable Technology, Psychadelics and Other 2015 Predictions A third-party analytics firm, called Vivametrica, which will analyze the data and provide its report with findings to the court, will be involved versus just submitting raw data into evidence. This use of data is an unexpected one, which could set a challenging precedent as the availability of such data increases.


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Vivametrica Launches Health Data Aggregation Platform for Fitness Trackers, Apple Watch,

Google Fit Hu’s company, Vivametrica, is building a cloud-based platform for aggregating data from any kind of bio-sensor, from popular fitness trackers to medical-grade health sensors. Vivametrica plans to store that data for you so you can see all the data from all your devices in one place, compare it to others who are like you, and eventually feed that into medical applications that doctors and HMOs could use to help prevent illness, diagnose conditions, track health, and discover unprecedented insights into what truly constitutes healthy living.

And not just just to derive averages. Hu expects to be able to provide specific, actionable health advice for you, based on others who are similar in age, sex, health status, fitness level, geographical location, and more.

Vivametrica Unveils Open Source Healthcare Analytics Platform for Wearables

Building on more than decade of clinical research on the science of exercise, the company's goal, according to founder and CEO Dr Richard Hu, is to “take our research information and apply it as a data analytics platform, bringing information in, in a standardised fashion, making meaningful analysis and providing tools to consumers, to industry and to enterprise.”

Hu also says that Vivametrica will “distribute that information — with appropriate security and privacy safeguards — to work as part of further data analyses in an interactive process.”

Will Analytics Pique Provider Interest in Wearables? The answer may very well lie with analytics – taking data from those devices and making it useful for doctors. Earlier this year Vinod Khosla, one of Sun Microsystems co-founders, predicted that over the next decade data analytics “will do more for medicine than all of the biological sciences together.”

Wearable Sensor Eliminates Painful Prick for Blood Glucose Monitoring As more wearable health devices become available to consumers, we may soon be faced with loads of data that we don’t know what to do with. To help consumers make sense of data gathered by these health and fitness trackers, a Canadian startup has launched a platform that aims to bridge the gap between the hardware and meaningful health data. Vivametrica is a service that analyzes data from wearable sensor devices for the assessment of health and wellness.


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Doctors Launch Platform to Make Meaningful Use of Data From Wearable Devices Based on years of clinical research linking activity and health risks, Vivametrica's device-agnostic platform delivers a standardized approach to data collection and management, bridging the gap between wearable fitness applications and actionable health data. This combo promises credible and personalized assessments, as well as research-backed analytics. Mentioned assessments can be used to determine individual risk for chronic conditions such as heart disease, diabetes and back pain; and to provide personalized health targets and goals based on objective data collection.

Maneesh Juneja

Startup of the Week: Vivametrica The impetus to begin working on Vivametrica came from an accumulation of past experience with clinical care and research. However, the “aha moment” came when I started doing more in depth investigation of activity monitors on spinal diseases. That coupled with some recent health problems in my family acted as a trigger to convert the knowledge and relationships that I had accrued over many years into the development of Vivametrica.

Vivametrica Makes Pitch for mHealth Data Aggregation and Analysis Market The market for mHealth data aggregation platforms has become increasingly congested over the past year, with Apple and Google joining the more healthcare industry-focused Validic. Now Vivametrica has joined the space, outlining plans for a platform that fixes the inconsistencies in data from consumer mHealth products and combines them with outputs from medical devices.

ZDNet reports Vivametrica will enter private beta later this month and hopes to introduce a free, consumer-focused version of its platform in December. The platform will initially pull data from devices such as Fitbit and aggregators such as Google Fit and Apple HealthKit for analysis alongside public health information. By comparing an individual's data with public datasets, Vivametrica thinks it can show users how changing their lifestyle would affect the probability of certain health outcomes.

Pilot Study Suggests Wearable Devices Can Help Alleviate Back Pain Vivametrica’s pilot study, released today, finds that body mass index is the best predictor of daily function in people with LSS, suggesting that weight loss and increased physical activity may improve the condition. Lane says that “80 percent of people will have lower back pain at some point in their life” and that the cost to the economy runs into billions of dollars. Combating ‘diseases of inactivity’ with a combination of wearable devices, comparative analytics, and personalised e-health interventions could be very big business indeed.


Activity Trackers to Help Decide Personal Injury Cases Don’t look now, but the activity tracker on your wrist may be the key to victory in the courtroom -- in the right circumstances, at least. A Canadian woman embroiled in a personal injury claims case will soon use Fitbit data as evidence that an accident significantly limited her activity levels. She'll wear a smart band for several months to determine whether or not she's sufficiently active for someone in her age group and job. If she's clearly behind the curve, she may have strong proof that she deserves compensation.

Court Sets Legal Precedent With Evidence From Fitbit Health Tracker The information for the case will be willingly provided by the plaintiff and processed by data company Vivametrica, which collects data from wearables and compares it with the activity and health of the general population. The plaintiff’s lawyers will use the data in an attempt to prove the accident’s detrimental affects.

“Till now we’ve always had to rely on clinical interpretation,” Simon Muller of McLeod Law firm in Calgary told Forbes.

Calgary Lawyer Using Fitbit Wristband to Provide Courtroom Evidence of Injury But Muller began talks with local startup Vivametrica about a different use for the device — tracking just how non-active his client has become.

Vivametrica pulls and analyzes open-source data from smartphones and wearable fitness devices to provide information about health trends and activity levels. The company will now be comparing the activity of Muller’s client against normal people in her age range.

“This is evolving,” Muller said Monday. “This is new and very cutting edge . . . It is potentially a new way of objectively quantifying the subjective reports of injures people suffer.” Fitbit Data Used in Court For First Time

However, activities vary from person to person, and it’s very hard to use this data in court. That’s why the lawyers won’t use the data directly. They will feed the data to analytics platform Vivametrica, which uses public research to compare a person’s activity data with that of the general population.

Muller added that a lot of people want to use this kind of data for personal injury claims.

“I’m already lining up more clients with a variety of circumstances to use this data,” he says. “You can’t rely on just one piece of data. You have to get all the pieces lined up.”

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Fitbit Data is Now Being Used in Court: Wearable Technology is Set to Revolutionise Personal Injury and Accident Claims “The Functional Activity Assessment is objective and represents a real-world assessment of function,” said Dr Richard Hu, founder of Vivametrica. “Appropriate use of individualised activity data collected by wearables provides the legal profession with methods for the early assessment of the strength of their clients’ cases.”

Move Over DNA, Your Wearable Data Could Soon Be Used in the Courtroom Simon Muller, the head of McLeod’s personal injury practice group, told Forbes that they will be using the data, to demonstrate that due to the accident, her activity levels are now below the baseline of “someone of her age and profession.” The firm plans on using an analytics program called Vivametrica over a period of several months to process and analyze the Fitbit data. Generally in cases of this nature, the plaintiffs are medically evaluated and the doctor who examines them shares his observations in court. But this will be the first case of its kind to utilize data tracked by wearables likes Fitbit and could set a precedent for future claims.

Do Doctors Hate The Internet and New Technology? Now that wearable technology, mobile health applications and e-health uptake is accelerating rapidly and has been gaining users and industry attention, the deeper questions regarding the relationship of new technology to healthcare providers and health systems are arising. In particular, there is scrutiny into how to encourage users to adopt and regularly use these hardware and software solutions.

Could Wearable Tech Change the Way Personal Injury Claims Are Assessed? Vivametrica can bring in data from a number of different wearable sensors including several Fitbit devices, Samsung Galaxy Gear and Gear Fit, and anything that feeds data into Apple’s HealthKit. The normalized data with which the user’s steps are compared is broken down by age, gender, body mass index and waist circumference.

Why Apple Watch Could Be Good For Your Heart Rate Heart rate can tell us

about physiological processes that the cold and calculating accelerometers cannot. On the flip side, accelerometers provide us with accurate measurement unfettered by our morning coffee, stressful meeting or bad cough. Together, these metrics make a very powerful team.

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Vivametrica Wants to Aggregate Health Data from Fitness Tracking Wearables But what if there was an easy way for doctors and other medical professionals to access this data to help curb obesity and prevent other diseases? That vision is exactly what Vivametrica has in mind with the launch of their new health data aggregation platform, which pulls data from smartphones and wearable fitness devices to get a big picture of health trends – with the user’s consent of course.

Wearable Tech Initiative for mHealth Launched by Team of Doctors The wearable tech industry specifically for activity and sports trackers is expected to reach $1.4 billion within the upcoming two years . This will allow for a tremendous collection of activity data. A team of doctors feels that this presents a massive opportunity for leveraging that data to develop resources that will help people to be able to make meaningful decisions with regards to their health care. The team is working under the name Vivametrica.

While Apple HealthKit Works Out Bugs, Cleveland Clinic Uses

Microsoft’s HealthVault Platform to Reach Remote Patients While the Cleveland Clinic is still waiting for Apple’s HealthKit Platform to work out its bugs, the renowned health provider has quietly been using Microsoft HealthVault to keep tabs on remote or at-risk patients.

“HealthKit is just one of many tools that we can use to engage with patients, and there are many others like [Samsung’s] SAMI, or Vivametrica,” says Cleveland Clinic’s associate CIO, Dr. Will Morris.

But HealthVault may be one of the most mature platforms available to providers, and Cleveland Clinic is using it to care for patients in its “Distance Health” program, Morris told VentureBeat Monday.

Data Normalization: A New Source of Value for Your Healthcare IT Clients As much as the talk of health information exchanges and predictive analytics in healthcare grows, it’s impossible to ignore the fact that some basic standards around data can’t be overlooked if these goals are to be achieved. One of the biggest is data normalization.

The Microsoft Band: Another Step Forward For Wearables? With more than a dozen similar devices now on the market or planned for release soon (including high-end, fashionable bracelets and at least one wristband designed by a music producer and artist), the so-called "race to the wrist" is in a full frenzy. But Rick Hu, CEO of Vivametrica, a Calgary-based developer of mHealth tools, feels the healthcare industry isn't really paying attention to the devices themselves. They're watching for the software.


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Vivametrica Launches Health and Fitness Data Aggregator for Actionable Insights into Your Wellbeing Vivametrica are aiming to take the digitisation of healthcare to a whole new level. They’ve developed an open source platform which pools data from wearable fitness trackers, enriches it with health data, and examines it through research-proven analysis to assess and predict health status.

Founder and CEO, Dr. Richard Hu told John Koetsier of VentureBeat, “This would be the biggest imaginable pool of people for researchers to study. It’s an opportunity to create native information that is out in the wild that doesn’t get biased or influenced by study parameters.”

Vivametrica is a cloud-based platform that will act as a sink for data from wearable sensor devices, fitness tracker apps and medical-grade health sensors and then will help analyze it for assessment of health and wellness.

Apple Watch is Going to Measure Heart Rate. So What? Accelerometers are fabulously accurate for measuring exercise intensity. They also work independently from the rest of your life, emotions and bodily functions. This makes them a great objective and consistent metric for monitoring and prescribing physical activity; and we are just scratching the surface into the possible applications of accelerometry in health.

So why is it exciting that we now have heart rate sensors AND accelerometers in the same place? Think Jerry McGuire: they complete each other. Heart rate can tell us about physiological processes that the cold and calculating accelerometers cannot. On the flip side, accelerometers provide us with accurate measurement unfettered by our morning coffee, stressful meeting or bad cough. Together these metrics make a very powerful team.

HealthBeat 2014: 61 of Digital Health’s Brightest Stars to Speak in San Francisco Monday

and Tuesday Overall, more than 500 health care executives, IT decision makers, investors, and press will discuss trends, highlight solutions, and showcase breakthrough products in health care technology, including . . . Matthew Smuck, MD, Director of the Center for Medical Mobile Technology, Stanford University.

If It's Your Wearable, Don’t You Own the Data? But with the advent of wearable devices, such as activity monitors, a new data set is being produced: activity and health data powered by you. YOU buy the wearable and YOU are quite literally the engine that produces the data derived from the device. Here’s where things get contentious: Are YOU the owner of that data? At Vivametrica, we think the answer is ‘Yes.’


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Wearables in Healthcare – IT Solutions Providers Highly Dependent on Wearables Market Companies like Canadian startup, Vivametrica are working to bridge the gap between the data that wearables provide, and clinical applications. Patients and your clients will find the most value in connecting this data to creating personalised risk assessments for chronic conditions like heart disease, diabetes, and back pain, along with creating actionable health targets.

Security And Beyond. With the increased use of this data comes new concerns around security. According to Vivametrica’s CEO, Dr. Richard Hu, technology like Vivametrica’s will “distribute that information — with appropriate security and privacy safeguards — to work as part of further data analyses in an interactive process.”

Stanford University Opens Mobile Healthcare Research Wing It’s thought that the biometric data and remote communications provided by the ongoing mobile revolution can have huge benefits in the realm of telehealth, allowing doctors to offer diagnosis and guidance to patients without requiring them to physically be in the same room. Vivametrica is another player in that same growing field, albeit one that has specialized in wearable tech. As one of its co-founders, Dr. Smuck would seem well-suited to his new role at Stanford, where his mandate will be to figure out how the biometric health data collected from mobile devices can be interpreted and applied in more meaningful ways. Another Vivametrica co-founder, Dr. Christy Lane, will also be on staff at the Stanford Center for Medical Mobile Technology to provide expertise in the field of exercise rehabilitation, a field of study that seems particularly ripe for biometric enhancement.

Startup of the Week – Vivametrica The clinical research that led to Vivametrica’s creation has been ongoing for years and continues to advance. The more challenging aspect for us to date has been coming to understand everything it will take to grow our technology, services and organization in a way that will make us responsive to the rapidly growing demand for health data analytics from wearables, which we see as a vast market, differentiated along several industry verticals.

Stanford Launches Research Center for Wearables With Vivametrica, Lane has been doing a lot of work with accelerometers. She sees an untapped potential in how wearable devices equipped with accelerometers can measure exercise, and how that data can be used by clinicians to "identify optimal timing for treatment" of chronic conditions, obesity-related issues and rehabilitation, among others. She feels that many clinicians aren't making the connection between exercise and healthcare, and sees the Stanford lab as an opportunity to prove that point.

Does Being a Surgeon Qualify You to be a Successful Startup Entrepreneur? Medical practice has changed very little over time. Although diagnostic testing and surgical techniques have changed significantly, the fundamental way that we assess patients and arrange surgical procedures has remained static. Although medical practice hasn’t changed much, many of the things that I have experienced and learned during training and practice seem to have prepared me for the ups and downs of heading-up a technology startup (I think). The surgical world is very hierarchical and for many surgeons it is difficult to acknowledge and admit that there are gaps in experience and abilities.


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Waking Up to the New World Order of Wearables Data Security At Vivametrica, our focus and skill has been in the analysis of large data sets that are typical to the information obtained through wearable technology and relate this information to predictors of health, fitness and disease. More importantly, as clinical researchers we are also acutely aware of the importance of personalized health information being maintained in a secure manner with safeguards to prevent dissemination of this information to unauthorized individuals or entities.

In the Future of Wearables, the Device Doesn’t Really Matter As the wearables market continues to expand, the winners in the device space will be those that extend their value proposition off the user’s wrist, head, hip, etc., and into practical use cases and applications at home, work, play and in-care.

This may happen through acquisitions, technical partnerships, or perhaps a revised business focus on infrastructure or data analytics solutions, but there’s no question that the devices themselves are the least important factor in the future of the wearables market equation.

Forget About Health Data Aggregation – First Make Wearables People Want

to Wear Vivametrica’s Christy Lane, M.D., and Misfit’s Kalmar agree that while consumer fitness wearables are of limited value in a clinical setting right now, wearables makers are now working with partners to make devices that yield data that might be useful to doctors and researchers. Lane said her company, which makes an open integration platform for wearable devices, is hoping to bring in biometrics data from wearables and establish risk thresholds for certain types of behaviors.


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Vivametrica’s Use of IoT in Healthcare Dr. Christy Lane, cofounder and COO, Vivametrica, talks about how the IoT influences what her company does, how data gathered helps healthcare decisions, and what market opportunities this data provides.

ONC Ready to Take Next Step Toward Interoperability, But Contradictions Remain – Healthcare Accelerators Moving Toward Specialization As the federal government announces another step toward wiring the country’s health care system this week, centripetal forces are threatening to disrupt the whole federal health IT program. The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT on Wednesday is announcing a draft roadmap for interoperability — the free and secure flow of healthcare information — by 2024.

The Spinal Stenosis Pedometer and Nutrition Lifestyle Intervention (SSPANLI): Development and Pilot The SSPANLI intervention was shown to be feasible, atSpinal Stenosistractive to participants, and effective in this small sample. This intervention provides people with LSS the opportunity to participate in their own health management, potentially improving access to care. Efficacy is currently being assessed in a randomized trial.

SensorUp, Vivametrica Partner to Standardize Wearable Device Data for Healthcare Environments The exponential growth in the number of people tracking their health through activity monitors and biosensor devices is driving the need for industry standards. To ensure the validity of this personal data, Vivametrica and SensorUp today announced an exclusive partnership to collect, standardize and integrate data from wearable devices for application in healthcare environments.

This partnership standardizes and calibrates the data that will integrate into Vivametrica's analytics platform, resulting in exceptional data management and accurate assessments for consumers, enterprises and healthcare organizations.

What do Wearable Technology and Sherlock Holmes Have in Common? Understanding what you are seeing and what you are not seeing is the first step in gaining a deeper knowledge of the individual. Certainly, the next steps in engaged health are coming, and it is our collective responsibility to guide these developments in ways that prove beneficial and valuable to the individual. When it comes to crime-solving techniques and the world of wearable technology in health, I believe that the Sherlocks portrayed by Robert Downey, Jr. and Benedict Cumberbatch would both agree that many pieces of information critical to health are related but often dismissed.

What Changes in the Wearables Market Mean for Healthcare IT Solutions Providers As ABI points out, one of the key areas of the emerging opportunities is data collection, specifically the ability to harvest data from multiple vendor devices and then share it accurately with patients, providers, and payers. In the last six months, Apple, Google, and Samsung have all announced their plans to provide RPM devices.


Stanford Launches mHealth Research Center Stanford (Calif.) University has launched the Stanford Center for Medical Mobile Technology, a new research center dedicated to new ways to bring wearables and other mobile devices into healthcare.

The research conducted at the new center is “necessary to harness the full potential of mobile technologies in the healthcare arena,” said Matthew Smuck, MD, founder and director of the Stanford Center for Medical Mobile Technology. “While biometric information is increasingly available in the commercial sector, it commonly lacks the scientific validity necessary to make the transition to healthcare applications. By applying rigorous medical research methodology and advanced statistics to the analysis of mobile technology data, we aim to create new insights into human diseases and develop novel tools for disease detection and prevention.”

New Stanford University Research Center Aims to Use Mobile Health Data to Improve Treatment Plans Stanford University has established a new research center to focus on leveraging measurable and meaningful data from mobile health devices to improve treatments for chronic conditions. The Stanford Center for Medical Mobile Technology is headed by Matthew Smuck and Christy Lane, co-founders of a Canadian-based company called Vivametrica that is developing an analytics platform for wearable devices.

Microsoft Readying Smart Watch; Stanford Gives mHealth Research its Own Center Mobile technology research is getting big attention at the Stanford School of Medicine with the opening of a new center to be run by Matthew Smuck, co-founder of Vivametrica, a commercial firm specializing in wearable tech's healthcare applications, according to a Mobile ID World article. The new branch will be for the integration of mobile technology into healthcare.

Data from wearable devices could soon land you in jail Muller's client voluntarily shared a weeks worth of Fitbit data with Vivametrica so it could be compared with data from other Fitbit users. His client, a former personal trainer, had been in an accident that affected her ability to work; the data was used to back up her claim.

Health & Medicine

Vivametrica Media Coverage_2014