Azumio turns your phone into a biofeedback device

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Sumi Das: Silicon Valley startup, Azumio, is developing mobile apps designed to monitor and maybe even improve your health, whether it's analyzing your heart rate, controlling your stress or tracking your sleep patterns. The company is using technology inside the Smart Phone to give users a better and more accurate view of their personal health. Jen Grenz is a Vice President with the company and she's here to tell us more about it. Jen, thanks so much for joining us today. Jen Grenz: Thank you for having me. Sumi Das: So Azumio offers a series of apps and these are Smart Phone apps that help users gauge their health. They take advantage of the Smart Phone's built-in camera, accelerometer and the touch screen so that you can know what's going on with your body. Tell us the basic premise for the company's technology. Jen Grenz: Sure. Azumio was funded in 2010 with the sole premise of turning the phone into a biofeedback device, which means we want to gather as much personal health data from your person just using the technology that's in the phone. Sumi Das: Your first app that you offered was a heart rate monitor. There are so many heart rate monitors on the market. How does yours differ? Jen Grenz: We don't want to use any external hardware. Most other heart rate monitors in the market use some sort of either fingertip device or chest strap to then monitor your heart. We actually were able to use the camera in the phone where you place your finger over the camera, like so. We'll use the flash to illuminate your finger and once we detect a pulse, it takes about 10 seconds to get an accurate heart rate reading. It's plus or minus accuracy from a beta medical oximeter and we can then store that reading so you can gain patterns and recognition as to your heart health. Sumi Das: How -- so is that just as accurate as those chest straps that you would wear? Jen Grenz: It, it really is. We, we see them to be the same or very similar, plus or minus one beat as a, as, a chest strap you might have. You can of course then share this to your social networks if you want and then, and then store it for future reference. Sumi Das: The other app that you have is one that measures sleep patterns and it does this by figuring out how much your move, so I'm assuming it takes advantage of the accelerometer built into the phone? Jen Grenz: That's right. So the sleep app was our newest of the applications that we were able to launch recently. You have a clock here where you can set your alarm, press start, you'll flip it over and put it under your pillow or under the sheets so that it will stay secure while you sleep. And it uses the highly sensitive accelerometer in the phone to judge how much you move at night, then we can track your sleep cycles. An average sleep time or a sleep night lab would look like this, where we can measure when you went to bed, how long you slept, how much you were awake, how much you were in deep sleep or light sleep and then actually calculate an efficiency. Sumi Das: So what about the stress app? You have an app that measures stress, I imagine this is something that probably a lot of people could use. How does that work? How do you measure stress? Jen Grenz: So the app is called stress check and this is using the same technology as instant heart rate, where you're placing your finger over the camera, but we're actually measuring heart rate variability, just the time and distance between each one of your heartbeats. This app takes about a minute and thirty seconds to two minutes to gather enough data but it's a self learning algorithm, so as you test yourself more and more, it will get smarter to your regular heart patterns and then it will give you a percentage reading how physiologically stressed your heart is. This doesn't necessarily always correlate to emotional stress, but physical stress on the heart. Sumi Das: Obviously I'm assuming that you're not advocating people should use these apps instead of seeing a doctor and getting their regular checkups. Why should we be monitor our health so closely? Jen Grenz: I think there's a really big trend in the self or quantified self movement. People are tracking their health patterns so that they can start getting some, some pattern recognition, what's happening to their heart, how stressed are they, how well are they sleeping any given night, which will allow them to become more smart about their daily choices and even share that data with their physician. This is not a replacement for your annual exam or any other appointment that you might have from a medical professional, but this will supplement any sort of diagnostic properties or, or even times when you're trying to just understand a little bit better about what's going on. Sumi Das: What about people who maybe aren't so aware of, you know, what a healthy heart rate should look like? You have this information but it doesn't necessarily tell you what to do with it. Do the apps give you recommendations? Jen Grenz: So not quite yet. We're about to build a, a lightweight dashboard, which will pull the data from all of the applications and then start recognizing those trends for you. So you can start seeing if you're exercising regularly, your resting heart rate will go down as your heart gets fitter. And we'll be able to send you alerts to say, hey, this week, your resting heart rate on average was a beat lower. Congratulations, keep up the good work. Sumi Das: Thanks so much for sharing this information with us today. Jen Grenz: Thank you. Sumi Das: For Smart Planet, I'm Sumi Das.

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