Concept
A wearables company that prioritizes user ownership and privacy of biometric and health data, leveraging a token economic model.
Longer Description
Biomarker data is rapidly becoming less expensive to capture, yet traditional healthcare doesn’t have easy ways to integrate all of this new data into EHR’s. It’s also extremely difficult to access your EHR, which doesn’t prioritize the individual’s needs. The longer-term vision is a massive aggregation of all the biomarkers and digital health data, securely stored both in transit and at rest using cryptography (be that ZKP, FHE and/or secure MPC). But the path to this end-state is less clear. Perhaps the best initial approach is to target the high-need/low-support patient communities that are worst served by the existing healthcare system.
The value proposition and economic model is relatively clear & straightforward. With this model you have privacy guarantees and data ownership at the individual level
- only the user can decrypt their data, ensuring ownership & control
- data portability allows users to easily transfer some or all of their data to other platforms, research groups, clinical trials — this remains a massive unsolved problem today within traditional healthcare
- a utility token that facilitates the flow of data, access, sharing, value within the ecosystem — users can easily be rewarded for contributing data (voluntarily & with consent) to anonymized and aggregated research databases; they can also restrict or revoke these permissions
- there is an interesting synergy where this platform could work with decentralized storage providers (or perhaps vampire-attack them with a specific focus on health data) and utilize the token to allow for premium features, services or pay for additional storage
Other Thoughts
There are both push & pull trends that will accelerate this future quicker than expected.
- On the push side, it’s clear sensitive health data continues to be mismanaged and insecure (23andMe data breach as most recent example). There is likely to be a watershed moment that serves as the straw that breaks the camels back when it comes to health data privacy. Bitcoin’s birth stemmed from a similar moment in time for financial systems. It is inevitable we’ll see something similar that accelerates the adoption of more user-owned, privacy-focused health systems.
- On the pull side, there are high need/low support patient communities that are ripe for activation — targeting specific indications first is likely the best initial GTM approach
The crypto community is increasingly interested in longevity, healthcare and biohacking — the ideals of self-sovereignty map very well here so long as the consumer product is at feature-parity with existing wearables on the market today (Oura, WHOOP, Apple Watch, etc)
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