Jason Moore: Revolutionizing Health Metrics with Spren | Ep. 288

Welcome to the Gladden longevity podcast with Dr. Jeffrey Gladden, where our passion is helping you to become an AJ hacker. On this show, we want to help you optimize your life energy, longevity, health and human performance with impactful and actionable information by answering four questions. How good can we be? How do we make 100 the new 30? How do we live well beyond 120? And how do we live young for a lifetime? Now here's today's episode of the Gladden Longevity Podcast.

Welcome everybody to this edition of the Glad Longevity Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Jeffrey Gladden and as always, we're here answering the big questions in life. How good can we be? How do we make hundreds of new 30? How do we live well beyond 120? How do we actually live young for a lifetime? And how do we create a 303,000 year old mind? All of which will elevate us in terms of how we live life and enjoy it. Today I'm going to be joined by Jason Moore, who's the founder of a company called Spren, that's S P R E N. And we're going to be talking through a technology that he's brought tomor that has to do with using the phone's camera to measure things like HRV and body composition, as well as heart rate, of course, and respiratory rate. They're having really great success with over a million users and wide adoption of this technology. And I thought it would be an interesting conversation for you to listen in on. We talk about a number of different factors that are important for health and well being. We talk about the use of the camera, how it's working, what the roadmap is for additional services that we provide in and how they're expanding their impact. Really interesting conversation, so I hope you enjoyed as much as I did. Welcome everybody to this edition of the Gladden Longevity Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Jeffrey Gladden and today I'm joined by Jason Moore. Jason is an owner, director, creator. I don't know exactly what we'll find out of a company called Spren, which is doing some really interesting work in actually making technology available to most people if they only have a phone, which I think almost everybody does. So, Jason, welcome to the podcast.

Dr. Jeffrey, appreciate your time and having me on and spreading the good word about longevity and I've learned some stuff as well already. So. Okay, excited to be here.

Oh good, I'm glad to hear that. So tell us a little bit about your journey. How did you end up in this Spot what got you going?

Yeah, I mean, the nuts and bolts of it are that I've always been healthy, conscious, fitness conscious, you know, that kind of thing. Growing up, I was an athlete. My parents were kind of try to be conscious about it. Although it's kind of funny to think some of the things that they tried in the name of health and well being. But I am a technologist by background. I also was a coach that coached people in health and fitness space. And really this, all these pieces started to collide around this idea that the answers that we're looking for are often in our body and it just requires the right tools and technology and interpretation to unlock those answers. And so as a crazy entrepreneur, I was like, well, I can build all those technology. I can build the technology that will unlock those answers. And we have been pretty successful in unlocking some of those answers, which has been really exciting.

So cool. Very cool. So tell us a little bit about the technology. How does it actually work?

Yeah. So basically the flagship technology right now is our camera based body composition analysis. So using just the camera of your phone, you can scan your body and get the body composition analysis that you would normally have to go to a DEXA machine for.

So you. Are you saying that with a camera you can kind of intuit bone density? Is that what you're trying to say or.

No, that's the one piece that is. We haven't cracked that nut yet, but it's more focused on body composition.

Okay. So when I think of dexa, I think of body of bone density as being one of the primary metrics. So you're really talking about percent body fat and muscle mass and things like that. Is that correct?

And distribution around the body, which is also important. Of course.

Correct and distribution. Okay, perfect. Okay, good. So is somebody naked when they take these pictures or how do they do that?

You can, although we don't recommend it, I mean, there's no reason to. You just usually get into tight, fitted clothing. So a lot of people will do it in their underwear or in like tight fitting athletic clothing. And we've trained our model using thousands and thousands of people and comparing it against DEXA as our benchmark and gold standard.

Yeah.

So it works under a wide variety of conditions and is highly reliable.

Okay, well cool. And then you must have some coaching that you're doing around that, is that correct? Well, there are probably other things that the camera is doing. Maybe walk us through the suite of things that the camera is able to, to give people information on.

Yeah, sure. So I Mean, as you and your listeners would be well aware, body composition is one important component of things to track while you're on a longevity journey. Also rate, heart rate variability, respiration rate. These are all things we can also get from the camera now. And our background is actually stems from a deep research into heart rate variability. So we know a lot about that, and we work a lot with that. You can get that very accurately by putting your finger over the camera of your phone. And we have future technologies that will make it even contactless. But so you can track those metrics on a daily basis and understand how your baseline is changing for those. And then, of course, go ahead. Sorry. Just to tie a bow around it, we also have blood labs offerings and integrate with blood labs, and we also will integrate with wearables, bring in sleep and activity and stress and all these other data points too.

Okay, got it. So you basically have an app that uses the camera for certain metrics and then also will link to other wearables and some labs.

That's right.

Got it. Correct. Okay, cool. Well, the camera thing is kind of interesting because there are some people, not everybody can afford a whoop or an aura ring or an access to that. Right. So with the camera, if they get the app, is there a price for the app? I suspect there is or there is, yes.

You can get some free access to some of the features. So it just kind of depends if you're working with one of our partners or if you're coming. Coming off the street or something like that. But you can check it out for free at Spren. Spren in the App Store, sprin.com. but then there's a subscription that's just a consumer. It's like a normal consumer subscription price.

Right.

And that there's different tiers depending on what you want.

Sure. Understood. Okay. And so I guess you've been able to. With heart rate variability, instantaneous heart rate variability. I can see how you could get that off the camera. Are you actually using the camera to kind of measure the pulsation against the camera, or is it visualizing changes in blood flow that you can kind of take a look at? Is that how you're doing that? Right, right.

Yeah, it's the. The acronym is RPPG and photoplasmography, I think if I say it correctly, but. But yes. So it's essentially measuring pulse wave volume changes through the finger over time and kind of similar to how wearables do it. Light shines through your skin and through your finger, and we can see the changes over time. And because we have a long history with hardware, we've been able to train models to really accurately pull the signal from the noise. And that's kind of our secret sauce, so to speak, is that we had a long history with dedicated medical grade hardware that we then decided to self cannibalize and say we're going to go all in on using, using devices that people already have. And our hypothesis was that if we can do that and make the data quality high, that will just blow the doors open on who can get access to these insights. And just the number of things that people do with it now is just mind blowing. I just learn things every day, which.

Is, yeah, give us an example. What are people doing with it?

So, I mean there's kind of, I even have my own personal stories I can share, but they're, you know, on the heart rate variability side, it's everything from managing chronic diseases or even reversing them in some cases. Not saying that just measuring HRV does that automatically, but of course in conjunction with lifestyle changes, supplements, Even pharmaceutical interventions, etc. Managing post, you know, traumatic event recovery all the way up to using it to train and win Olympic medals. And so it really spans the full spectrum of, you know, stepping back from chronic disease all the way up to maximizing performance on a number of different, both cognitive and physical performance markers.

Cool. Very cool. So people are using the HRV to help them with all of that. So do you want to talk a little bit about the use of hrv? It's, I think it's a really fascinating topic. Right. So I mean, when HRV is high heart rate variability, I guess we need to define that. It's basically the distance, the way I think about it is it's the distance between beats. So you have a beat and then there's a time period, it's a distance or a time and then there's another beat and then after that beat there's another beat and after that there's another beat. Well, there's a distance or a time difference between that. And so the, the difference in the B2B difference, the just the difference in the difference between or in the distance between those beats is the way I describe it to people, is actually heart rate variability. And so when the parasympathetic nervous system is in charge and you're feeling pretty relaxed in Zen, everything gets kind of sloppy, right? So you inspire heart variability, goes up, you expire, goes down, it's moving around. There's a lot of variability and that means that everybody's kind of relaxed, but when the bear comes through the door, everybody marches to the same drummer and every heart rate variability is lost and synchronicity is gained. Right. So you can tell how relaxed your system is, and it sort of transcends what we cognitively feel is relaxation. That's one of the been the fascinating things. In other words, it can tell you things that you wouldn't cognitively know. For example, you can wake up and feel like, oh, yeah, I feel fine today. And yet your heart rate variability will tell you a different story. It will tell you that, no, your body is actually fairly stressed, it's still fatigued. Or that thing you did yesterday, that meeting you were in, or that mountain bike ride you did, you're still actually fairly fatigued from that. And it's incredibly helpful because it enables you to actually adapt to what your body is capable of doing in this particular day, whether it should focus more on recovery or taking on. This is a day to do a pr, right? On a personal record, it can help guide you in that path, which enables you to actually to be really wise about elevating your performance. Right. Because you're not like over training, you're not under training, you're actually giving your body or asking your body to do what it's actually built to do on that particular day. So it's super helpful. And then you can also monitor how stressful the activity is. So if you're using it in the middle of it and you see that sympathetic nervous system tone is very high. Well, you know, that was a high effort. Right. So there are many, many, many uses to it. So do you have training videos for people to actually understand how to do this on the, on the app? Is that how you're doing it or.

Yeah, it's interesting. You, you asked that. So the short answer is yes. And, and that's kind of also what brought us around to body composition as well is because is hrv, which is. It's this incredible metric that can tell you so much, but it's not necessarily an outcome that people are kind of intuitively trying to seek. Right. And many people are trying to seek an outcome of improving their body composition.

That's right.

Whether that's for longevity or performance or aesthetics. Exactly. Yeah. And so we kind of see those, like body composition for those journeys is like the bookends. It's the starting point and the outcome that you're seeking. And HRV helps you tailor the behavior on a day to day, week to week basis as you're navigating that journey. So they work really well together.

Yeah, it's interesting. You know, we live in a world of GLP1 agonists now. Right. And so with GLP1 agonists, one of the things that we notice is that many people will lose weight, but they tend to lose muscle mass as opposed to fat mass. And we've even seen bone density gone down. So it's kind of made us. We were never big GLP1 users like DE novo, but people would come to us on them and when we would use them, we were very cautious about measuring things and we've discovered that. So now we're using GLP1s either in lower doses or for shorter duration. There's some health advantages to microdosing, things like that. There's a lot of longevity benefits to other drugs in the space like SGLT2 inhibitors that basically lower blood sugar also, but also have a lot of great impact on senescent cells and the immune system. My point is that body composition is really the right metric because if all you're doing is following a scale, you can really be misled. You can think, oh, I've just lost 20 pounds. We don't realize is that, you know, it was all muscle and bone and you lost very little fat. And you know, as soon as you start eating again, everything's going to come roaring back. Right. So do you have any insights around that in terms of how you're using HRV to keep people on track?

Yeah. And you know, kind of like you mentioned, HRV pairs nicely with behavior change because you can track it regularly and you can anchor a lot of the behaviors to changes in the nervous system and reactions from the nervous system. And ultimately with body composition, you know, there's a few levers that you can pull. Obviously there's pharmaceuticals as well and that's going to continue to get advanced. But building a strong base for many people. There's a lot of. I don't want to call, I kind of shy away from calling it low hanging fruit now because to some people that tree feels like it's really tall. But exercise, nutrition, managing stress, managing inflammation, sleep and all these types of things that we talk about, but so they, they play nicely together. And you don't have to use HRV to optimize or to even, you know, especially not to get started with those things. But it can really help you find your way through sticking points and to, like you said, not overdo it, not underdo it. Find the zone of adaptation where again, if you're measuring the outcome, in this case body composition, you can know on a week to week basis are the things that I'm doing, laddering up to the outcome I'm looking for. And these measurement tools can detect things like you mentioned as well, that are not easy to intuit yourself. And the changes that it can see are much smaller than the changes you can see. But of course, the payout over long term is tremendous because from a body composition standpoint, especially, you know, we think about insulin control, you know, inflammatory markers and hormone regulation and metabolism, all of these things are highly correlative with changes in body composition and changes in hrv.

Yeah, no, I think that's right. Yeah. And the more information you can get if you're listening to this, more information you can get, the better. Right. So if you don't know your hormone levels and you don't know what your thyroid is and you don't know, you know, your risk metabolic rate, and you don't have a sense of some of your nutritional levels and things like that, it's easy to get sideways. So it takes a little bit more than hrv, I would say, to actually really get yourself dialed in. But it can be kind of a nice yardstick to go along with. Right. So that's why you're offering some of the other tools that you are right for the blood work and things kind of.

HRV is like a check engine light in a sense. It tells you if some. If things are going well or not going well, but it doesn't necessarily sarily tell you what.

That's right. That's right. That's right. Yeah, you got to go to a little more diagnostics and then. Well, or as much as you can, and then you got to basically be able to address things at that level.

Cool.

So you have quite a few people using the. The app, is that correct?

Yeah, we're fortunate now to have reached over a million people and, you know, tens of thousands are using it every week. And it started out in the. In the lab basically, is what I say, because it was sports teams and research labs that were kind of the early adopters. And then it's always been our goal, though, to kind of like take it out of the lab and bring it into the real world where people are facing the battle of daily life. So we're excited to have it all built into the phone now where anyone can access it.

And what's next on the roadmap for you guys?

Yeah, so we're partnering with experts and providers like gyms, coaches, experts such as yourself, to kind of help connect people with the content and the guidance and the facilities that they need to improve their. Their longevity and performance.

Nice.

So it's kind of in. In my mind, it's like the data. There's a vast amount of data that we can get, gather and provide insights from. Yeah, but you could be drowning in data and not get any results if you don't do anything.

That's right.

And so the partnerships really help us connect all those dots and provide, you know, all the services that people need.

Yeah, that's. It's nice. You're creating a network, really, so that people can access the different pieces. So if they do need a DEXA scan, they can go to get a DEXA scan or whatever else. Right, right.

Yeah, yeah. And then also things. Gyms are really a big button item for us right now because, you know, the gym industry has been in some ways one of the cultural centers of longevity without even kind of intentionally being it.

Right.

And now they're trying to kind of tap into the, you know, the rising space.

Right?

That's right. But they aren't necessarily equipped to kind of turn on longevity services, so to speak.

That's right.

I guess I'm putting balloons up for that. I'm not sure why my camera, for those listening, is just spouting balloons out. But. But. So we're partnering with gyms to help them address things like nutrition, to help them address things like measuring body composition and integrating blood lab information and things into the journeys of their members who are becoming more and more interested in these topics. But they don't necessarily have, you know, the staffing or the business models to serve it.

Right, Nice. Well, that's great. That's really great. And so with the sensor development, are you seeing there are other things that you'll be able to do with the camera?

Yep, we have a path to. There's. There's a deeper rabbit hole that we can go through even with just body composition and HRV and heart rate and things. Pretty soon we'll have VO2 max capability from the camera. And that's. That's an exciting pillar of longevity as well. But then blood pressure is also. We have a path to detecting blood pressure from the camera. And so we're excited about just unlocking more and more. And we're not against hardware, obviously, there's amazing hardware out there that can tell, like you, like you mentioned with the dex, that we can't do bone density.

Right.

And we don't necessarily see a path to being able to do that with the camera.

Yeah.

Although, of course, having higher lean muscle and lower body fat percentage and just generally being stronger and more active is pretty predictive of bone density. And then in. And then in edge cases, you can also look at, you know, nutrition and other things. But so, yeah, so we're just excited to continue to unlock more and more insights from the body. And then we also plug those into now some conversational AI experiences that let people chat with their data, basically, and understand it and kind of digest it in a way that makes it relatable.

Yeah, very good. Yeah. Being able to estimate VO2, I think you're not measuring it, of course. So you're estimating on some level.

Estimating is actually the right word for all of these metrics. Even PPG devices like wearables are not actually measuring heart rate, they're just estimating it.

That's right.

And so it's. How accurately can you estimate, essentially?

That's right, yeah. I think the. The utility comes in being able to show that the ups and downs. Right. The delta, if you will, between measurements, as long as there's enough fidelity in the measurement that it's reproducible to some. Within some limits. Right. So. Yeah, no, exactly. Well, very cool. Well, congratulations on what you're doing. Congratulations on the big adoption. I think you're making a real difference. So that's super fun to see.

Thank you. Yeah, no, I appreciate it. And thanks. Thanks to you as well. I mean, like. Like I was saying, getting the data from your body, it's an important sliver of the pie, but it's just one sliver of the pie. That's right. And people need to learn what it means and actually apply it to their lives. But what we're trying to ultimately do is to say the formula for the basics is pretty simple with regard to exercise, nutrition, stress, sleep and all this stuff, but the implementation is just incredibly difficult when it gets hit in the face with real life.

Yeah, no, that's right.

So having these feedback loops. Any system that is seeking to improve requires feedback loops.

That's right. And the more instantaneous the feedback, the better.

Exactly. Yes.

For sure. We were so impressed with that when, you know, continuous glucose monitors came out, that all of a sudden there was nothing like instant feedback. Oh, I just ate that. Or I ate it in this sequence or whatever it was. And you were learning, learning, learning so quickly that you could. You actually would never learn going to a doctor's office, fasting and getting your blood tested, or even pricking your finger. Right. Because how many times a day do you want to stab yourself? So it's really. Yeah. Really revealing when you have. And very powerful. I think it's the most powerful coaching tool we have is real time feedback or.

Yes, exactly, feedback.

So.

Yeah, because then it takes the. The complexity out of it, really. It's like, I do this. This happens.

That's right. Yeah. You learn so fast. I think it's important when you're using devices like this that you quote, unquote, play with them, that you try different things. It's like, oh, well, I'm gonna, I'm gonna do this and see what it does. It's like, oh, well, I had this kind of sleep last night. I'm gonna try that same thing again and just see what it does. Right. So there's so many different kind of variables that. That kind of link together here that I think the best way to do any of these is to really literally play with them. Like, try this, try to trip it up, even. See what you learn. You'll just learn, learn, learn, learn. It's not about actually trying to comply with the device. It's more device to see what, what it'll teach you and what you'll learn from it. I think if you take that approach, you'll go a lot further.

So, and, and then same with body composition, you know, because we benchmark off of a DEXA, even people who do DEXAs may do them, you know, once or twice a year or something like that.

Right.

In this case, we recommend people do it maybe once a week or once a month, kind of depending upon what they're phase of their journey they're in. But you can get really tight feedback loops by saying, you know, this week I'm gonna try to, you know, consume less sugar or something like that, and then see after a week if it's moving the needle. And, you know, we, we try to be careful with that too. To say that, like, losing fat or building muscle takes time, so you're not going to reach your goal in a week, but if you can see after a couple of weeks that you've been moving in the right direction and then it's working and it makes it psychologically easier to stick with it. It also helps you, you know, maybe drop things that you're spending a lot of time and energy on but aren't serving you.

That's right.

So that's right. Feedback loops.

Yeah. No feedback's key, so. Yeah. Beautiful. All right, well, thanks so much, Jason. I appreciate you sharing your tech with us. It's really, really cool. So how do people get a hold.

Of this if they'd like to spren.com is a good place or Spren in the App Store. That's S P R E N S.

P R E N. Okay, Spren, how'd you come up with Spren?

Spren is basically inspired by my favorite author, Brandon Sanderson, who I think is one of the greatest of all times. And it essentially means to me the embodiment of the human experience.

Okay, nice. All right, well, that's. It's easier to remember Spren when you know what it is. So.

Yeah. Yeah.

All right, well, beautiful. Well, thanks again, Jason. I really appreciate you taking the time to chat with us.

Yeah, likewise. Thanks for having me. Dr. Jeffrey. Yep.

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