Brainstem leverages wearable devices to collect medical grade data, provide analytics and allow users to monetise their data.
Why is health data collected from wearables so valuable?
Access to large quantities of data collected by consumer wearable devices has the potential to revolutionise the provision of healthcare and promote research that will lead to new discoveries which will improve health and wellbeing.
How will Brainstem support this revolution?
Brainstem Digital Health will support this revolution by providing a scalable, de-centralized platform that leverages accurate but inexpensive wearable devices to collect medical grade data, including: heart rate, heart rate variability, blood pressure, SpO2 and other health metrics that are in the process of being supported by rapid technological evolution of wearable devices.
In addition to a unique set of monitoring and therapeutic features within the Brainstem application, users will also be able to collect and publish their own data to an Ocean protocol powered Data Union in collaboration with DataUnion.app. Subscribers, including but not limited to medical researchers will, for example, be able to access data using compute-to-data methods that support AI modelling.
In order to provide economic incentives to promote data collection across a broad demographic, Brainstem will use tokens to reward participants who collect data and agree to publish it. The Brainstem mobile application will have an integrated wallet, allowing users to receive, store and exchange those rewards. Data consumers wanting to access data on a Data Union will be able to acquire tokens in order to do so. We expect this market to become increasingly sophisticated as the; range of participants, both publishers and subscribers, the range and depth of data and the methods by which the data is collected expands.
Inter wallet messaging will empower participants by providing ways to form dynamic collaborative teams to achieve specific data collection and related research goals. This feature will power a permissionless digital health web by supporting the development of applications which monitor ailments, track changes, and support therapy. This will in turn serve as the basis for future digital health centres.
Our initial approach
Brainstem will initially focus on heart rate variability (HRV), a proxy for Autonomic Nervous System health and by association, the health and wellbeing of the brainstem itself. More than 50,000 research papers strongly suggest that better understanding of HRV has great potential to support the discovery of biomarkers for general health and wellbeing and offers the prospect of improved detection and in some cases management of disorders associated with mental health, cardio-vascular, neurodegeneration, sleep, and even Long Covid.
Feature and data access limitations of current wearable hardware, such as Apple and Fitbit, precludes an open platform on day one and Brainstem will provide an affordable wearable device that is optimised to collect and publish data across a range of conditions that are designed to yield new insights that will support future improvements in health and wellbeing.
Our ultimate vision
“Brainstem seeks to redefine the way in which users interact with wearable technology in order to build the next generation of wearable health insights through the creation of the largest and highest quality wearable health data set available for all to leverage.” Max Campbell, Co-founder and CEO of Brainstem Digital Health
Medical research and health equity is limited by the costly, intermittent and labour intensive way in which health data is currently collected. Decentralised, DIY, large scale collection capability is likely to unlock a new generation of wearable insights and lead to new discoveries and associated improvements in health and wellbeing.
Brainstem and associated tools, will promote the alignment of incentives that is needed for open data collaboration. The Data Union will enable data providers to publish their data in an anonymised, GDPR compliant manner and receive both economic and social rewards, which will incentivise growth of the ecosystem. Open API’s coupled with the recycling of network revenues through a decentralised autonomous organisation (DAO) will help drive additional 3rd party software and hardware integrations, which we hope will drive a virtuous cycle of insight generation that will promote research and yield new discoveries.
