The future of health starts with you
Some research has shown that it takes 21 days to make a habit (Source: HBR). We all know that during the New Year many people make resolutions … So now that we are 23 days into the New Year it is the perfect time to reflect on which habits have lasted.
Healthy habits are near and dear to our hearts and something that keeps us up at night. Our first decentralized application launched in 2017 was a healthy habits app. We believe that many of the health problems around today are linked to behaviors we engage in on a day to day basis. Behaviors are also very challenging to change (source: Pubmed).
Can we use technology to reinforce healthy behaviors? We believe if we can promote healthy behaviors, we can have healthier, longer lives.
Bowhead’s journey
When we started Bowhead Health, we had a hypothesis that lateral flow assay technology could serve as an important framework to assess biomarkers and potentially some vitamins. We worked with one of the leading companies in the United States that has the know-how and in the end determined that we could perhaps capture Cortisol — which has some evidence as being an indicator for stress.
After a lack of interest for the hardware on Kickstarter we decided to focus on scaling the piece of privacy-preserving software.
At Bowhead Health, our first beta application in 2017 was a Healthy Habits application to help you track your water intake, sleep, bowel movement, mood. That application has been live since then and what sets us apart from the other 300,000 digital health applications in the market is that we don’t collect your email or phone number … instead we provide you with “keys” that encrypt and decrypt your personal health data.
Since then we have worked with the world’s leading life science organizations in testing this out. In our experience in healthcare these types of pilots and validations take years.
We believe this digital health challenge is a decades long journey and not an “overnight success”. Our team has shown resilience through tough times and also won some awards along the way:
- 2019 Xconomy Boston Biotech Startup 1st Place Winner Award
- 2019 HLTH Finalist
- 2020 Eli Lilly Atopic Dermatitis Global Challenge 1st Place Winner
- Read press release
- 2021 End ALS and Roche Canada Machine Learning 1st Place Winner for Task #2
- Read our Open Science Submission
- 2022 Roche Global “Best Newcomer” Award
We are excited to keep building. Over the last few years we have seen other healthcare industry failures such as Theranos and Viome. These provide important learning opportunities for the industry and reminders of the level of care and regulatory compliance required to ship healthcare products. At Bowhead, we are committed to not offer any diagnosis via our apps until they have the appropriate validation.
The silver lining of having a small ecosystem (comparing health-focused vs. finance-focused organizations) is that like minded companies come together faster, for example Bowhead joined dHealth in 2022 which is a Swiss Based Foundation which has many notable partnerships:
Dhealth Website: https://www.dhealth.com/
Dhealth DHP Token: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/dhealth/
Every blockchain health company faces an uphill battle yet we believe that over time, more people will demand to own the keys to their health data and Bowhead would like to contribute to that development.
2023 Trends and Outlook for Health Technology
In the startup world, AI and Generative AI has been buzzing with technology such as ChatGPT and other Generative AI startups. We believe this plays a very positive role for Web3 digital health solutions.
Firstly, ethics will become more important as healthcare AI solutions need to carry a level of consent and cannot have a blackbox approach to the trained data. In other words, the AI must be explainable. Web3 offers an elegant solution because people could train data completely anonymously without having to provide email or phone number, instead just logging in with Metamask.
Other future trends we see:
- Ownership of data and proof of participation in training of AI models
- Health Decentralized Autonomous Organizations around particular diseases and patient populations
- Complete integration between immersive video games and health applications
At Bowhead we continue to focus on our mission to help people live longer, healthier and longer lives. Please download our applications from Bowhead Labs which we are currently refining in our continuous pursuit of mission.
Download and try our live Bowhead Apps
Please note our applications are not medical devices and most are at a beta stage. Please make sure you write down your 12 words and backup your account. If you lose this we cannot recover your data!
Better by Bowhead (healthy habits and migraine tracker)
- Live since 2017
- Download for iOS
- Download Android
Skin Diary (helping people with atopic dermatitis)
- Beta live since December 2022
- Download for iOS
- Download Android
- Currently in Beta (plan to launch DAO features by early 2024)
Better Quest (immersive video game linked to your habits)
- Download for Android
- Coming soon for Apple
Buoyant (cognitive behavioral therapy sessions)
- Download for iOS
- Download Android
Coming Soon: Transdermal Machine Vision heartbeat analysis
- Read Evidence on potential of transfermal technology for healthcare
- Plan to go live within next 90 days
- Proof of participation in $AHT
As you may notice, none of these apps require your email as they are all using Bowhead’s blockchain identity layer (view Bowhead’s Blockchain Explorer). If you’re interested in using this technology please use our Github or contact us support@bowheadhealth.com to help your project’s privacy needs.
We have also a patent-pending which is set to be made public with the United States Patent Office on a “Digital Platform for Community-based Privacy-preserving Data Science“
Over the coming 12 months we plan to deeply integrate $AHT as a proof of individual participation in our apps to take another step forward in unlocking the future of healthcare. Please note $AHT is a proof of participation token for healthcare and not a financial asset.
Look out for a branded $AHT Wallet on both app stores iOS and Android in the next 60 days. We are committed to continuing the development of Bowhead and making a dent in the world by providing a health data management system that puts people in control of their health data and their encryption keys.
Thank you for taking the time to read this and we hope to hear from you soon. Feel free to join Bowhead’s telegram community for any questions or comments.
