010 - Ryan Kraudel - Biometric Sensors + Hearables

Guest: Ryan Kraudel, VP Marketing - Valencell

Topic: Biometric Sensors + Hearables

Dave brings Ryan Kraudel on to talk about the type of biometric sensors that Valencell manufacturers and the various devices that these sensors are being embedded into. Valencell makes optical-based, PPG (photoplethysmogram) sensors that are capable of capturing and measuring a wide-range of biometric health data points. If you've ever seen the green blinking light on the underside of an Apple Watch, that's the PPG sensor capturing one's heart rate data. 

As the two discuss during the episode, there's been a breakthrough recently with these type of sensors, both in the size of the sensors (allowing for them to be embedded on devices as small as a receiver-in-the-canal hearing aid) and the sophistication of the machine learning algorithms that are used to asses the data. Given the widespread of adoption of consumer wearables and the increasing amount of sensors that are being outfit on these devices, the two talk about how this will give rise to personalized, individual longitudinal health data sets. 

The health baselines that can be established with consumer wearables and the ability for machine learning algorithms to detect deviations from the baselines, will usher in a much more proactive phase of healthcare. Rather than reacting to the symptoms of being sick, this new combination of technology will allow for Apple Watch, AirPods and other wearable users to be alerted to potential risks being discovered within their data. This is the era of preventative health and as Ryan mentions, we're only beginning to scratch the surface with the types of metrics that we can glean from the broad swath of health data being captured by Valencell's PPG sensors. 

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