LifeQ Hopes to Change Health Care with Disease Screening and Early Detection

ATLANTA—LifeQ, the company that uses globally-recognized watch brands to gather personalized, clinical-grade data, announced it can detect as many as 40 sleep and cardiovascular disorders with smartwatches and other wearable devices, with an anticipated 100 diseases and disorders within the next two years—revolutionizing health care and improving consumers’ lives. LifeQ co-founders Laurence (Laurie) Olivier, CEO, and Franco du Preez, chief science officer, made the announcement.

“Wearable devices are the future of personalized medicine, providing continuous health monitoring and enabling the prevention of common diseases and disorders,” said Olivier. “There is an urgent need for accessible, clinical-grade insights on a broad scale for both healthy and sick humans, from young to old, preventative and curative, chronic and acute, whether before, during, or post-treatment. This coverage is now achievable—not with complex medical instruments, but with simple everyday wearables.”

Smartwatches and other wearables allow ongoing measurement of an additional layer of critical biometrics beyond the commonly available heart rate, skin temperature and blood pressure to sleep activity, respiratory rate and daily fitness, which make clinical-grade health screening and monitoring possible. With this wealth of information, smartwatches and other wearables are suited to monitor long-term health conditions to assist physicians and health care professionals ahead of diagnostics and during treatment.

“LifeQ’s mission is to help people age well,” said du Preez. “By delaying biological aging, reducing the probability of chronic disease, screening for the early onset of disease, as well as maximizing human performance, harnessing more energy and gaining a deeper understanding of one’s own unique body and health—lives may be transformed for the better.”

LifeQ is integrated with other brands, including Fossil, TAG Heuer, Mont Blanc, Suunto and Xiaomi, and three companies in the global Fortune 50, comprising approximately 50% of all wearables manufacturers in the world, delivering connected health solutions that help people make better lifestyle choices every day.

“LifeQ complements and supports physicians and health care providers in their important diagnostic work, capturing biometrics 24/7, 365 days a year, flagging issues, and facilitating diagnosis and treatment,” said Armin Deffur, chief medical officer. 

LifeQ-enabled devices aim to help clinicians detect important medical conditions, enable data-driven disease classification as well as facilitate disease prevention. Instead of relying purely on a verbal history from a patient, the period leading up to a clinical presentation may be examined at a more granular level.

Chronic disease affects 50% of the population and represents more than 85% of health care costs today according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; it is also the hardest to detect. LifeQ’s technology, already integrated into some brands with other daily utilities beyond health monitoring, assists with flagging chronic disease by providing the longitudinal data needed to establish a baseline that may then be monitored over time to determine changes in biometrics—some of which may only be picked up over years.

Acute disease, which represents a sudden and severe health problem, can affect every person at any age and may often go unnoticed until the patient has already become ill. LifeQ’s technology has successfully flagged acute disease in a broad range of participants over the past several years, including during the COVID-19 crisis, by flagging and enabling treatment and preventing spread, often in patients that did not exhibit symptoms.

Screening for and flagging disease using wearables is possible through LifeQ’s unique combination of photoplethysmography (PPG) and computational systems biology approach. Predictive models that are contextualized with respect to existing scientific knowledge and causal relationships enable the flagging of diseases and disorders that may otherwise be impossible to recognize until they have already progressed.

LifeQ may flag such sleep disorders and diseases as narcolepsy, sleep apnea, restless legs syndrome, insomnia, rapid eye movement (REM) sleep behavior disorder, sleepwalking, night terrors, hypersomnia, circadian rhythm disorders and periodic limb movement disorder (PLMD).

Cardiovascular disorders that may be flagged include hypertension, myocardial dysfunction, high cardiac output states, hypertrophic obstructive cardiomyopathy (HOCM), aortic stenosis, bradyarrhythmia, tachyarrhythmia, atrial fibrillation, bigeminy, trigeminy and arteriosclerosis.

LifeQ’s mission is to positively impact the current global shortage of primary care physicians by providing critical pre-diagnostic biometric data and enabling qualified care professionals to perform a first-order triage and treatment of diseases and disorders that would not require the attention of a primary care physician.

Wearable devices will soon enable insights for hundreds of diseases, providing a personalized action plan and a truly preventative approach to health care.