George Takei meets with Atlas Wearables at the Pure Austin Gym, visits Filament Labs to chat patient engagement and learns about aging in place with Frog Design.
Looking good.
What? Looking good! You made me lose count.
Was that 87 or 97? In my endless quest to learn all things tech I’ve come to America’s new tech mecca.
I’m George Takei, and this is Takei’s Take Austin, Texas Today I’ve come to the Pure Austin Gym.
For some exercise and to meet three entrepreneurs.
To help my answer the question: Are the greatest tech advancements happening in health and wellness? First i meet with who’s developing a new fitness monitor.
You can wear it on the wrist and it’s for the in-gym experience.
We use a lot of inertial sensors.
Aircraft-grade accelerometers, gyroscopes, are all used to identify when you’re doing pushups, situps, squats.
So this device is in development – where do you work on this? So we’ve been working on it for about 18 months Now we’re actually working out of a startup house.
This is where we’re building Atlas.
We got all of the furniture in this room for just $120.
This is where a lot of hardware action goes down.
We can test the screen, we can test the touchscreen.
Really quite an incredible experience to have this opportunity to build Atlas in just a homey environment.
We got a startup dog.
Sort of the mascot.
Surprising it’s therapeutic.
And i understand that you got capital for this with crowd-funding.
Indiegogo campaign.
That actually gives us a livestream of what the Indiegogo is at.
We raised over $620,00 We’re very lucky to be the most funded product in Austin tech.
What I’m really excited about is being able to feed a number of symptoms into a machine and then this machine is fed with every piece of knowledge we have about different diseases and conditions and early indicators of those conditions.
Peter introduces me to Jason Bornhorst of Filament Labs.
This is so Austin.
A gym full of entrepreneurs.
Tell me about your operation.
We operate in the space called patient engagement.
We turn paper-based care management: patient discharge from a clinic, into a mobile solution.
Tell me how this all works.
Our app is given to the patient when they’re still with the doctor instead of giving them paper now they’ll be asked download our app.
What that app does is two things: it delivers tasks the patient’s been asked to do on a day-to-day basis.
They actually get a reminder for each one and the task can be really simple things such as logging patient’s mood, collecting the patient’s blood pressure or for example hydration management.
As i submit each of these pieces of information, that’s now instantly available for my doctor, for my caretaker, for my family.
We just raised about a million dollars in financing to help us run our operations.
We have money to fund us for about the next 15 to 18 months.
The objective is to bring this to as many people who need this as possible.
You’re going to have a great future i think.
Thank you.
If we live a hundred twenty-five years let’s live it in a way where our bodies still move, you know, where we still sleep and we still rest.
To learn about aging in place, i also meet Eric Baczuk from Frog Design.
Lately we’ve been doing a research program we called aging in place looking at how technology can be used to help seniors live more independently.
We meet people in their homes, they walk us around, show us the things that they love, show us the challenges they have and use it as a jumping-off point for design.
So a lot of my devices have to do with the smart home and understanding what’s happening in the home from an abstract level.
We’re looking at having sensors embedded throughout the home, use this technology to help people maintain the high quality of life and health that they could get at home without having to be transferred to a long-term care facility.
My Take: tech innovations aren’t just about cool gadgets or photo sharing apps.
These young entrepreneurs want to help people lead healthy lives and they represent the vanguard of tech advancement.