Lactate, Ketones, Glucose — Let’s Not Get Hangry
We are in the infancy of wearables, predicting sensors will just about explode in popularity. Various sensors already track data points such as heart rates, sleep, blood glucose, different hormones, but many are still highly underutilized or full of errors. CES was held in Las Vegas again this January and boosted a huge amount of product launches, also with personal sensors. Could these new sensors help realize more value into the ecosystem? Let’s examine.
Continuous Glucose Monitoring (CGM) has been a popular area the past few years, with companies such as Levels, Veri Health and Tyler Health providing applications built on Abbott’s personal sensor which includes a small needle in the arm. This year Abbott announced a new strategy and new additions to its consumer products, mainly in the new device called the Lingo, including tracking markers such as glucose, ketones and lactate in the blood. This would allow to position Abbott as even more a platform for consumer health and wellness companies.
Another company to watch, Rockley Photonics, announced a non-invasive photonics based technology product being able to measure “heart rate (HR and HRV), core body temperature, hydration, blood pressure, blood oxygen, alcohol, lactate, and glucose indicators” without a needle. While this technology is likely not going to be mainstream right away, it is far more convenient than needing to pierce the skin in case it is accurate enough. However, noting how companies like Apple with its Apple Watch and Oura already use photonics sensors in discerning various data points, it hardly seems an impossible reach.
Now, let’s talk a little about why these matter and why VO2Max numbers have sucked so far.
Diabetics have been monitoring blood glucose for a long time now, yet devices have often been bulky and not consumer-friendly. Abbott’s been working with glucose monitoring for decades and its generation of always-on sensors was already a vast improvement, but being able to measure glucose in a non-invasive way is ground breaking and could offer an entirely new type of experience. Outside type 1 and type 2 diabetics, or pre-diabetics, what about non-diabetics?
Glucose is linked to brain activity and focus, and we’ve seen glucose monitoring used in competitive skills based games like poker in order to maintain optimal concentration (avoid becoming ‘hangry’). Glucose and what these new sensors will track, ketones, also give insights into your fasting cycle and your body’s metabolism. For weight loss their impact is fundamental, but the same can be said for sport performance and recovery.
Lactate is another highly interesting data point to track. Muscles build lactate when they are utilized intensely and understanding your lactate threshold is common reading for a long distance runner and a critical part of understanding and developing your body’s performance. Many devices today use a proxy number, called a VO2Max which roughly equates to a numeric showing your maximal oxygen consumption in the format of mL/(kg·min).
This number is ideally measured in a laboratory, with the athlete hooked up to tubes on a treadmill. However, many devices approximate this number and for the most part, they are not reliable. While this may seem as a niche number, it is important to many and it is also one that would be relatively easy to actually measure and derive, by being able to measure lactate among the other variables in your body. All this is to say, fueled by data, we could better understand and develop our bodies.
The implications are also universal, being able to understand muscles better via their lactate output, would highly assist planning for various recovery processes e.g. after accidents or medical procedures.
Predictive Power
The implication for also being able to accurately and proactively anticipate and pinpoint issues in the body to be diagnosed, is also a huge value. If your body’s glucose levels don’t behave as expected, or your ketone levels are not higher despite fasting, we can sound alarm bells and monitor proactively. This type of power and visibility will allow us to anticipate a wide range of potential issues.
Personal Value out of New Sensors
Given the implications and importance of all these new sensors, we believe it is imperative that we are able to properly and effectively utilize them. Being able to combine data points grouped by time stamps or organized properly into relevant structures is vastly important for the next generation of applications, but it is also of vast importance for us as individuals to really better monitor and understand our own bodies.
However, there are clear privacy implications of sensitive data, not to mention regulatory processes such as HIPAA. At Prifina we are working with various companies utilizing personal data in a way where the data never leaves the individual and we see a lot of utility being captured, where individuals can trust in their ability to retain their own data and use various applications on top of it.
Personally I’m just excited for the day when VO2Max approximations no longer suck.
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Prifina is building resources for developers to help create new apps that run on top of user-held data. No back-end is needed. Individual users can connect their data sources to their personal data cloud and get everyday value from their data. Follow us on Twitter, Medium, LinkedIn, and Facebook, or listen to our podcast. Join our Facebook group Liberty. Equality. Data. where we share notes about Prifina’s progress. You can also explore our Github channel and join us at Slack.
