Talking HealthTech: 293 – Solving chronic disease from the ground up. Tim Veron, Dr Michelle Woolhouse, Vively

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Vively was one of the start-ups that Tim Veron helped build. Before the company was founded, he was already active in several different start-ups in various countries, including Australia, New Zealand, and Southeast Asia. After meeting his co-founder Michael, they experienced the difficulties of having chronic  conditions in the family. In 2020, both of them gave up their jobs and purchased a company known as Natural Therapy Pages. This company is the largest directory of allied and complementary health services in Australia, and it features ten thousand different practitioners, including naturopaths, nutritionists, chiropractors, and even physiotherapists.

They came across an opportunity to learn more about healthcare. As a result, they decided to use that experience as a platform to combat lifestyle-driven chronic illnesses, which are the most widespread cause of health issues in Australian society.

They decided to start Vively to find a solution to the problem. Going directly to the customers is the best way to encourage them to adopt healthier lifestyles and behaviours and give them the mechanism to do so.

Dr. Michelle Woolhouse has worked in general practice for the past 20 years. She has a significant interest in preventive and holistic care medicine, which she incorporates into her practice by including lifestyle and holistic management. Take a look at the various aspects of health that may be affected, such as sleep, exercise, and nutrition, as well as the mental and physical aspects of health, such as how one perceives stress and emotional health. Working one-on-one with patients and finding that you have to repeatedly give the same piece of health advice may be very frustrating, especially if you are passionate about teaching and seeing the bigger picture. Having a meeting with Tim and Michael in Vively has synergy in their collaboration about the goal and mission of attempting to combat chronic diseases. Putting preventative measures through lifestyle medicine at the heart of their work.

How It Works

Vively is embarking on a mission to address the problem’s lifestyle and behavioural aspects to find a solution to conditions brought on by lifestyle choices. By providing information to consumers and a feedback mechanism that operates in real-time, we can show them how the choices they make affect their health. Things like food and diet choices, the type of exercise, the amount of sleep, and the amount of stress. People can make healthier choices in this process because they are better informed about their options, and over time, they develop healthier behaviours.

Smartphone Application

An updated version of the Vively application is scheduled to be available in the following weeks. The application is integrated with various smart wearable devices now available on the market, including Apple watches, Fitbits, and others. The integration of Australia’s most well-known glucose monitor is one feature of the application. People are given a personal insight into how their lifestyle affects their blood sugar levels and other health indicators by taking into account their heart rate, activity, and fitness routines.

Glucose Monitoring

One of the most critical indicators of a person’s health is how much they stay regulated in a small framework, and that is called homeostasis. The human body regulates all aspects of physiologic functions, such as the regulation of salt and potassium levels, glucose levels, body temperature, and much more. Glucose is one way of looking at a person’s homeostasis. At a preventive level, the body maintains sugar levels between 3.5 to 5.5. Eating a meal slightly elevates the blood sugar levels; however, when a large amount of carbohydrates or sugary foods is consumed, like chocolate, soft drinks, or other processed foods, the blood sugar levels spike.

Observing real-time how dietary choices can spike blood sugar levels is a good way of showing consumers its effect. In a healthy person, the sugar spike will naturally come down due to the insulin release pushing sugar into the cells. However, glucose levels stay elevated in a long-term dysregulation of sugar, and the required insulin to achieve homeostasis will also elevate. This can lead to insulin resistance, subacute inflammation, cytokine release, and other factors leading to more serious chronic diseases, such as fatty liver, type two diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, and obesity.

The benefits of glucose monitoring are a great way for people to look at how they interact in the presence of a loaded carbohydrate intake. The sense of empowerment is when consumers make their choices because people can see the result of those choices in real time.

Diabetes

It is encouraged to regularly check for blood glucose levels in people who experience either type I or type II diabetes. Type I diabetics will have to look at these levels throughout the day, which is why continuous glucose monitoring devices are a game changer for those patients. By using a sensor, a diabetic can easily record sugar information that can dictate the patient’s decision on how much insulin they must take. They can also consider how many exercises they use based on the monitor’s information. 

Type II diabetics are also encouraged to monitor blood glucose levels. However, it is challenging for those patients due to the painful procedure of pricking one’s finger. The skin thickens over time, and their enthusiasm to record levels tends to wax and wane over time. Particularly for those patients with type II insulin-dependent diabetics, if they are in the early stages or monitoring via diet or lifestyle changes. The fluctuations of taking one or two glucose measures throughout the day do not give you the overall picture that a patient can actually get from a continuous glucose monitoring device.

Glucose monitors are similar to patches in that they are not invasive. Normal daily activities such as working out and taking a shower won’t get rid of it. Putting on the monitor is virtually painless; putting it on or taking it off is a straightforward operation, and wearing the monitor is essentially simple.

Vively as a Preventive Tool

In recent years research has been conducted that it is valuable to monitor blood sugar levels even if the person does not have diabetes. A large group of people is pre-diabetic, which can lead to diabetes. From a prevention perspective, it is precious to understand the aspects of the lifestyle and behaviour of the person that can spike blood sugar levels. 

Vively is making technology and information much more meaningful. Peopl without diabetes can use the information and personal insight to make appropriate lifestyle and behavioural choices to prevent chronic conditions from occurring in the future.

Chronic Disease is Preventable

Studies show that people who reach the age of 50 and already have one chronic disease most likely have two or more other chronic illnesses. But going 50 years old without chronic disease then, the person is less likely to have it in the future. The underlying reason why people get chronic diseases is effectively the same, lifestyle issues, like lack of exercise, carry excessive visceral fat. Depression now has an inflammatory component, which already has a lifestyle medicine factor. 

When a person has a large amount of fat and less muscle mass, the ability of the body to regulate metabolism and support the physiology of the body becomes less effective.

The vicious cycle of increasing subacute inflammatory chemicals sets off cascades of impact in the human body. That is why chronic diseases are actually attached to each other. For example, suppose a person is diagnosed with type II diabetes. In that case, the patient is likely to have depression or risk of having cardiovascular disease, and even fatty liver can be acquired.

Looking from a prevention perspective, the beauty of lifestyle medicine is incredibly safe. It is effective across multiple conditions; supporting one aspect of the body can cascade into supporting numerous aspects of health. Which is a more holistic approach to medicine.

External Factors

External factors significantly impact a person’s health, such as exercise choice or the amount of exercise. Research suggests that a certain amount of activities can decrease mortality by 40%. There are a lot of Australians who are not getting adequate amounts of movement or exercise regularly. Factors such as sleep and screen time behaviour have seen massive shifts. Over the last 10 years, teenagers have had the least sleep in history. It is because of the increasing amount of screen time. Stress pressure is also a factor because of Australia’s increasing cost of living. Financial stress around the pandemic was a colossal example of external stress that people felt had little control in many ways. Australians are some of the most extended working people around the world. Many people have lost a lot of leisure time combined with poor sleep. Looking at the fabrics of the current society that needs to be addressed. And that is what Vively wants to address.

Understanding one’s own physiology can help empower people to make changes to the external factors affecting people’s health. Better sleep can lead to a better choice of food, a better mood, and a better relationship. The vicious cycle that people feel can actually lead to a joyous process. Given the right cues and motivation, moments in time can accumulate and help people feel that they have a control that previously they had not.

Habits

In Vively, an education aspect was started. Developing the framework of building habits. If a person starts with one habit and does small things regularly, they can make the most significant changes in their life. Because most of the time, people think they must change everything all at once. By changing one small thing at a time, then acknowledging some of the benefits achieved, they are building the confidence that can extend to motivation. That is what Vively is attempting to do, to support people’s healthy habits from a long-term perspective rather than a short-term intervention. 

Empowering People

Vively is trying to empower people with evidence-based concepts and technology. Research and education around lifestyle behaviours. Empower people with their health information so they can have the proper knowledge of what lifestyle factors are affecting their health. Being motivated because of the ability, people can get energised and engage in behavioural changes.

A foundational theory of behaviour change says people are constantly fluctuating stages of evolution. A person can be highly motivated in a few weeks but can drop off very quickly. In Vively, staged match intervention on a societal level helps people from the different stages of change of motivation.

Sustainability

Vively focuses on the individual levels that take matching interventions. The policy change also plays a significant role in a drastic lifestyle change because society makes it difficult to live healthily. Empowering thousands to millions of people to make healthier lifestyles can drive the system in terms of research funding, better-informed policy decisions, or making diet choices easier.

The healthcare system is a complex concept; taking a top-down approach in trying to solve the system of lifestyle-driven chronic conditions is going to take a long time. It is a challenging problem to solve, If taking a ground-up approach, solving the problem is probably faster and a battery way to accomplish the objectives.

Loneliness and disconnection are significant issues in the social element of medicine. The lack of social support is one of the problems Vively is trying to solve by motivating a large group of people to support each other. Community engagement makes healthier decisions like diet and lifestyle.

In the lifestyle medicine association conference, data suggest that 83% of General Practitioners are burnt out. They are frustrated that on the system, they can do more for the patients. Still, they are not allowed. However, by group initiation, empowering education, and community-based intervention, doctors want to support the idea that helping patients engage will be easier.

How to get Involved

Launching Vively in August, people can get more information regarding the product, which includes the continuous glucose monitoring aspect of the device, by signing up and getting a waitlist on the website.

The structure of availing the technology is a membership fee that gives members access to the application and personalised insights. Adding the hardware in terms of monitoring is like a sensor that typically lasts 14 days.

Members are recommended to constantly monitor blood sugar levels. What Vively is suggesting is to watch once every three months. Getting the sensor is trying to understand how their lifestyle choices, food, diet, sleep, or even stress are affecting their health. Depending on how often a person wants to monitor their blood sugar levels, the pricing will sort out on that frequency.

Thousands have already signed up for the waitlist. In the coming months, the management wants to enrich the personalised insights and consider mental health. Which is not covered well by the existing solutions in the market. Based on the evidence-based data on understanding someone’s mental health based on activity, blood, and sugar data. Vively is already thinking ahead on how to make a holistic mental health framework available for the people.

_{Source talkinghealthtech.com}