Bowhead is in a 10 year healthtech race not a 1 year sprint.
The Bowhead Health team has been fairly quiet at work but lets not mistake that for inactivity and we are excited to provide you with a wholesome update.
- The Current State of the Crypto Market
- Bowhead Blockchain Updates
- Healthy Habits App Update
- Bowhead Device Update
- Bowhead * Point of Care Testing
The Current State of the Crypto Market
Before we begin … The elephant in the room is the price of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies — and we are not going to avoid the topic — Yes, of course it affects the Bowhead project. It is important to say that we believe Bowhead is in a 10 year race not a 1 year sprint and here is Bowhead’s perspective:
The Good
Our initial decision to use blockchain technology infrastructure had nothing to do with the price of bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency. We believe that blockchain technology is still as good and only continues to improve with time.
We believe the exciting partnerships we are working on are insulated to the price and hype cycles- and more interested in the actual technical use-case of securing and providing user’s with full control of their health data. In this sense, our project has become numb to the price fluctuations as we continue our journey of developing the standard in digital health.
We continue to bet that blockchain technology will be revolutionary for people managing their digital health. Now more than ever, with privacy being at the fore front of people’s digital lives, blockchain holds the keys to this positive change.
The Bad
It’s undeniable that the startups that are associated to the crypto market by way of Initial Coin Offerings have been negatively affected. In our perspective, we are being pragmatic with the way we operate the project. We are being mindful on expensive sponsorships, conferences, and any other marketing which may hold short-term value but in essence does not add to our long term goal. We believe we have a sufficient pipeline of business leads where this B2B marketing is a high risk ticket item versus a necessary opportunity to be explored. In other words, you won’t see us as Gold Sponsors or giving out expensive swag anytime soon at your next crypto conference.
Of course, like any startup and any project there are inherent risks and we run the risk of never being able to do what we have outlined and failing completely but that does not stop us from trying to deliver the best solution for a broken health data industry rampant with privacy concerns.
The Future
Of course we want to continue growing our community and market awareness of Bowhead Health’s ecosystem. However, we believe that if our project is laser focused on doing what we have spelled out in the whitepaper, the buzz will speak for itself once we begin positively impact people’s lives:
Bowhead Blockchain Update
Bowhead Health launched its own mainnet last year and we have been seeing a steady uptick on the amount and frequency of the transactions on our blockchain. In other words, it is working :)
Please visit the Bowhead mainnet explorer at https://ahtscan.bowheadhealth.com
The Bowhead blockchain is a modified Ethereum blockchain that is connected to the healthy habits and other information people are completing. Bowhead’s blockchain stores the necessary user hashes that are used to decrypt people’s information on a private IPFS ecosystem we have set up.
Bowhead’s Data Ecosystem (Blockchain + IPFS) is in live and in production:
The Current Flaws of Bowhead’s Blockchain
One of the limitations of our current blockchain is that it is private which is obviously counter-intuitive for a decentralized ecosystem. Our plan over the next several months, is to develop installers which allow nodes to:
- Mine Bowhead Transactions
- Host encrypted data files
This is currently in the planning stages and we expect a beta of further decentralization and masternode to occur late this year or early next. We are mindful of the sensitivity of the data that we are hosting on IPFS and will need to also be mindful about which are the first few selected masternodes we allow on the network.
Once we have an alpha version our plan is to work with a respected, skilled entity like the Ethereum Foundation to validate our development.
Healthy Habits App Update
In the last couple months we deployed a few key feature and bug fixes:
- AHT Scratchcard — users who complete a full daily habits tracking cycle win a scratchcard that can win up to 100 AHT.
- Speed Improvements — the analytics were taking time to load during decryption of data and displaying the charts.
- Additional habit options — users were asking for “no bowel movement” as an option on the daily habit feature.
One of our applications Key Performance Indicators is the number of times users earn AHT for completing habit tracking. We have seen a positive trend in this regard:
In the next 90 days we intend to begin releasing additional features to the Healthy Habits app:
- A more user friendly on-boarding
- Allow users to select the habits they would like to track
- The Addition of bad habits (no one is perfect!)
- A dashboard for researchers to purchase data from users who have opted-in
Bowhead Device Update
We are planning to launch Bowhead’s crowdfunding campaign in February 2019. Please stay tuned and help us to promote the device funding efforts.
The Bowhead Device is in Final Stages of Development
Our hardware team decided to invest extra time in upgrading the device so it may be able to dispense multiple sizes of traditional pills and spherical gels. It has taken extra time but it means that our platform will be more flexible and have more use cases for traditional pill sizes.
Bowhead Point of Care Testing App
Bowhead’s partnership with the lab in San Diego, CA continues and we are approaching a functional prototype of a cortisol test. We expect to conduct a small field test or clinical study by the summer of 2019 to validate the results.
Cortisol is an important biomarker, there is lots of science-based research that suggests that it is a marker of stress. Stress, as you may know, is one of the big culprits for health.
By coupling this information with healthy habits and other laboratory tests, we believe people can make better and more informed decisions about their health.
Thank you for reading the full update. Please give us a clap and follow us for additional developments.
To Good Health,
The Bowhead Team
