Читать книгу The Future of Health - Roberto Ascione - Страница 15

Matteo Lai speaking at Frontiers Health 2018

Credit: Frontiers Health

The reason why we started Empatica, together with Simone, Roz, and Maurizio, my co-founders, was to create technology and products that help people manage their health.

Our brains did not evolve fast enough to cope with the complexity of the modern world. That is something we see every day, with people struggling with mental health, or suffering from chronic conditions that are completely preventable. Our objective was very ambitious: we imagined a world where the extreme complexity of human behavior and health is mapped and provided to each person, to get help and recommendations while navigating daily life. We imagined we would be building predictive analytics models, biomarkers that could monitor people's health automatically and unobtrusively. We knew it was going to be a long journey, but we had some principles in mind: these products would have to be based on cutting-edge science and technology. They would have to be beautiful and easy to use. They would empower each person and not become a system of surveillance to control them. So, we started building devices and algorithms to monitor real-time vital signs and autonomic nervous system activity.

Today, these products are used by thousands of researchers in the best hospitals and universities globally. They also support some of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies to run better clinical trials remotely. We then decided to help patients directly, with our first consumer product. In 2018, we introduced Embrace2, the first smartwatch to be cleared by FDA in neurology, designed to detect seizures for people living with epilepsy, providing lifesaving help to patients.

In the same year, we started developing an algorithm that would detect influenza infections. Following the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic we shifted the algorithm capabilities so that it could also detect the presence of SARS-CoV-2. With our wearables, it became the first wrist-worn solution to receive the European CE mark for Covid-19 detection, letting people know every morning if they should self-isolate and seek additional help, before they started feeling unwell.

We maintain our philosophy of building a revolutionary medical device with a beautiful design, expanding on our idea of applying AI to build biomarkers to support people's health. What if a cute little watch could predict migraines so that you could take a pill before the pain starts? What if it could understand if you are at risk of encountering a time of low mood or a depressive episode, providing you with help to avoid that altogether? What if you could understand what the most stressful events in your daily life are, empowering you and your partner with better insights? What if the watch could know you are getting ill before you know it?

This is not science fiction: we are currently running multiple clinical studies on these exact applications, with some of the leading experts in the world, to bring it from research to a real product. And it is very exciting to imagine how a better understanding of ourselves could help us live a better life.