Using AI and Data to Put Powerful Body Information in Fitness Consumers’ Hands. With Jason Moore of Spren.
Apr 23, 2024Season 2Episode 21
Jay Croft
They say knowledge is power, and mankind has never before had so much power – or knowledge – at our fingertips as we do now.
When that comes to fitness over 50, health and wellbeing, the potential for improving lives with this data is spectacular.
We can carry real-time information on body composition, biomarkers, heart-rate variability, sleep, stress and more with us at all times. But how can we use this information to help people understand their bodies and longevity, and make better decisions about exercise, diet and more?
That’s what we’re addressing on this episode of Optimal Aging, the show for fitness professionals serving the over-50 market. I’m Jay Croft of Prime Fit Content.
My guest is Jason Moore, who’s here to talk about his powerful Spren app, which uses your smartphone as a body scan tool for body fat percentage and BMI measurements, results he says are comparable to DEXA scans.
The Spren app helps track weight and weight loss, helps you understand the nuances of body composition, and lots more.
Now, if this seems a bit, well, fantastical to you… it did me, too! But the supercomputers in our pockets can do so much else, why shouldn’t they be able to help us understand what’s going on inside our body.
Using AI and data, Jason is helping to put valuable information into everyone’s hands through this Spren app technology, and the way he explains it, it’s not only possible, but fun and helpful. Here’s my conversation with Jason.
They say knowledge is power, and mankind has never before had so much power – or knowledge – at our fingertips as we do now.
When that comes to fitness over 50, health and wellbeing, the potential for improving lives with this data is spectacular.
We can carry real-time information on body composition, biomarkers, heart-rate variability, sleep, stress and more with us at all times. But how can we use this information to help people understand their bodies and longevity, and make better decisions about exercise, diet and more?
That’s what we’re addressing on this episode of Optimal Aging, the show for fitness professionals serving the over-50 market. I’m Jay Croft of Prime Fit Content.
My guest is Jason Moore, who’s here to talk about his powerful Spren app, which uses your smartphone as a body scan tool for body fat percentage and BMI measurements, results he says are comparable to DEXA scans.
The Spren app helps track weight and weight loss, helps you understand the nuances of body composition, and lots more.
Now, if this seems a bit, well, fantastical to you… it did me, too! But the supercomputers in our pockets can do so much else, why shouldn’t they be able to help us understand what’s going on inside our body.
Using AI and data, Jason is helping to put valuable information into everyone’s hands through this Spren app technology, and the way he explains it, it’s not only possible, but fun and helpful. Here’s my conversation with Jason.
They say knowledge is power, and mankind has never before had so much power or knowledge at our fingertips as we do nowadays. And when that comes to fitness over 50, health and well-being, the potential for improving lives with this data is spectacular. Data is spectacular. We can carry real-time information on body composition, biomarkers, heart rate variability, sleep, stress and more with us at all times. But how can we use this information to help more people understand their bodies and longevity and make better decisions about exercise, diet and more? Well, that's what we're addressing on this episode of Optimal Aging, the show for fitness professionals serving the over-50 market.
Speaker 1:
I'm Jay Croft of Prime Fit Content. My guest is Jason Moore, who's here to talk about his powerful Spren app, which uses your smartphone as a body scan tool for body fat percentage and BMI measurements. Results, he says, are comparable to DEXA scans. The Spren app also helps track weight loss, helps you understand the nuances of body composition, and lots more composition and lots more. Now, if this seems a bit fantastical to you, it did me too, but you know the supercomputers in our pockets can do so much else. Why shouldn't they be able to help us understand what's going on inside our bodies, using AI and data. Jason is helping to put valuable information into everyone's hands through this Spren app technology and the way he explains it. It's not only possible, it's also fun and helpful. Here's my conversation with Jason. Jason hi, nice to see you today. Thanks for joining me.
Speaker 2:
Jay, hey, happy to be here. Really appreciate you having me and see what we can learn today.
Speaker 1:
I just wish we could have done this in person, because you live in one of my favorite places.
Speaker 2:
Oh yeah, Asheville is wonderful. Interestingly, when we moved here, we had more users in our app than the population of Asheville and it was kind of a weird feeling to do that. But since we've moved here, a lot of others have discovered it as well.
Speaker 1:
Yes.
Speaker 2:
And it's growing a lot.
Speaker 1:
Yes, it is. I really enjoy Asheville. There's so much good food there. It's amazing how many fine restaurants and not just fine, but good restaurants there are up and down the pay range. It's really delightful.
Speaker 2:
Food and mountains. That's why people are like why'd you move to Asheville? I'm like food and mountains, those are two good reasons.
Speaker 1:
Well, listen, we're here today to tell the folks about what you're working on regarding Spren, and it's really exciting To me. It's interesting that it can do so much via the smartphone and provide people with really rich, valuable information. So, before we get into the nitty gritty of it, tell me a little bit about your backstory, the company's backstory and how it all came to be where we are right now.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, you know, I think there's a lot of things went into where we are today, but kind of my personal connection to it is I was an athlete growing up and then in my 20s I started to slow down. Everything got harder and I was trying to figure out why. In conjunction with that, I was seeing my aunts and uncles and parents and grandparents and people related to me and people that I love starting to struggle more with their health and having all sorts of issues springing up. All of the top 10 health killers are basically within one person of me and my family. We're a big family and also lots of health issues, but also generally reasonable people. These people who I thought are they know it all right Like these are the people I look up to and why are they struggling with these things? And so that's where some of the personal impetus of me just being really passionate about going down the rabbit hole of health and longevity and aging and fitness and wellness and all this stuff During the day, though, so I'm also a tech nerd and built my first computer when I was six years old with my dad.
Speaker 2:
I was also a tech nerd, was programming by age eight, and I've been in the industry.
Speaker 2:
A long time After college I worked in the energy industry.
Speaker 2:
I started to see these patterns where there was this shift from reactive maintenance to preventive and predictive maintenance because, hey, it costs millions of dollars and people can die if the equipment fails out in the field. And I started asking well, the most important piece of equipment that we have is our body, and why are we so reactive with our body, which is priceless? And started to think about how can we be more preventive and more predictive, use data, use sensors, use software to augment our decision-making and get better results with our body, better performance, as well as mitigate risk and stave off some of the challenges of aging and things like that. So these were kind of my two worlds that collided into this company, which started as a biomarker monitoring software and then kind of expanded into tracking other things and expanding our sensing technologies into the camera which we can talk about and ultimately, at the end of the day, just trying to help people find what works for them, make better decisions when it comes to health and fitness and wellness, and help as many people as we can.
Speaker 1:
Right. You're helping. You want to do that by getting them information. Is that right? Get really good, solid, relevant information in the hands of ordinary people.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, information is the starting point for me. It's partially because that's how my brain works, but also it's hard to know where to go if you don't know where you've been or where you are, and so understanding that's a good rule in life for a lot of things yeah, yeah, and so measuring things about your body and kind of understanding it more what's going on with it, what's working, what's not working this all really helps anybody.
Speaker 2:
Just tweak little things here and there and compound those little changes over time to get great results. I believe anyone can do it. It's hard to sort through all the noise out there and find what works for you, and that's where I think that using these signals from your body is like having a GPS right. That's because GPS, which is this underlying technology we all take for granted there's this global positioning system that's hyper accurate, tells you exactly where you are so you can navigate the most efficient path to your goal. It's an exciting subject, obviously for me, yeah yeah, it is.
Speaker 1:
I get it Totally. So now you've come up with something that's going to put really profound information about my body into my hands via my smartphone, correct?
Speaker 2:
Yes, yeah. So yeah, Early on, what we realized is there's really valuable information that you can get if you know which practitioners to ask, what coaches to work with or what labs to go get and what expensive assessments to go purchase. But other than figuring all those things out which is hard enough in and of itself you get dumped back all this raw data, and it's expensive, expensive and confusing and it's hard to understand what to do. So we saw that as an opportunity to say can we make this cheaper, Can we make it more accessible? Can we put it in your phone, Can we help integrate it into things you're already doing? And that way it'll just be so much more useful to people. So far that's worked fairly well.
Speaker 1:
And this is an app.
Speaker 2:
Yep, yeah, your phone is something you carry everywhere, right, and so it's where we tend to focus on making things accessible. So we have our app Spren. It's currently iOS. We were on Android and we plan to be back on Android soon, but we were progressing the technology so fast that it was difficult to keep it up to date on both platforms.
Speaker 1:
Okay.
Speaker 2:
Android's coming soon again, but iOS for now, for people can find Spren on the App Store.
Speaker 1:
S-P-R-E -N, spren S-P-R-E-N is an app, so I can get that on my Apple phone right, my iPhone. And what do I do with it and what's it going to do for me?
Speaker 2:
Yeah, so kind of keeping to the theme of figuring out where you're at and where you've been to then learn where to go.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, we like to start out with what we call assessments, and so what we've done is we've taken what we call assessments, and so what we've done is we've taken two of the kind of most powerful assessments that you can do on yourself but most people don't do because it was previously very hard or expensive or hard to figure out and put those in an automated way into your phone which are body composition and heart rate variability. We're looking at light shining through your fingertip into the camera of your phone and if you touch your finger onto the phone camera, and we've been able to develop extremely accurate detection of the tiny changes in your heart rate between every single beat as the light shines through your finger into that phone camera, and that opens up a whole world of insight into the body, whether that's stress, inflammation, recovery, your body's fight or flight response and its biological age, as some people like to label it. Hrv is a whole rabbit hole which we can get into. And then body composition we also can detect that using the camera of your phone, but in a different way. In this case, you have to stand back and stand in front of the phone and I'll say real quick that we are a privacy first organization but you do need to get down into some tight, fitting clothing, like some spandex or your underwear, and stand in front of your phone.
Speaker 2:
We actually scanned the entire body and our algorithms can very accurately detect patterns across your hips, your waist, your shoulders, your arms, your legs, and look at patterns that are correlated strongly with fat and muscle distribution around the body, which is body composition in this case, and help you understand. Do you have adequate lean mass? Do you have appropriate amounts of fat mass? Where is that on your body? How is that affecting your metabolic health, your energy regulation? And it also ties in with inflammation and hormonal health and longevity and a hundred other things.
Speaker 1:
You can tell all of that from my smartphone. I put my finger on my camera lens and then I take a picture of myself standing in my underwear, and from just that you can gather all of that information about what's going on inside my body.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, it's honestly kind of mind-blowing to me too, even though I'm part of the. You know the creation of it. Our camera tech has just come out. In the last few years We've been in business for 10 years now and if you look back on some of the things that I've said on the internet, I talk about garbage in, garbage out.
Speaker 2:
I talk about the importance of quality and accuracy and that's why originally we were recommending people use ECG-based chest straps to measure their heart rate and HRV and on the body comp side, we were recommending people go get a DEXA scan, which is this big $30,000 machine, dual energy x-ray absorptometry, if I can say that correctly. Okay, you lay in this big x-ray machine. Most people in big cities can go do this for about $150, pay out of pocket for it. Many people might have done it as part of their aging kind of health assessment because it also can help you measure bone density and osteoporosis. So as you get older, you might do a DEXA scan as part of that type of analysis. But it can also look and see how much muscle you've got, how much fat you've got and distribution of that.
Speaker 2:
I bring all this up because we still strongly believe garbage in garbage out, and that accuracy and quality is extremely important. And at the same time, we feel very motivated to break down the barriers for people of getting access to this data accurately about their body. And so what we did is we spent millions of dollars on R&D, using these gold standards of ECG and DEXA as benchmarks to collect ground truth. If you're familiar with AI and machine learning a little bit, ai kind of doesn't do well, trying to invent something from nothing. It really needs data to kind of train itself on and to build models around to start to be able to produce really amazing results. And so what we did is we had 43,000 people volunteer for research with us, which we feel so grateful to the community for all shapes and sizes, all ages, all countries and demographics and all sorts of different things.
Speaker 2:
But they were collecting ground truth data with these gold standard machines which are expensive and simultaneously taking pictures of themselves and recording light shining through their finger and all sorts of stuff that allowed us to train machine learning models and layer those onto algorithms that we've been developing for 10 years to get an extremely high level of accuracy of estimating these markers using machine learning and computer vision from your body. And so there's been research from MIT and other labs that have shown that this is possible for 10 plus years, so we're not necessarily thinking of it out of thin air that this is possible. But what the challenge research labs often have is that you don't have large enough and diverse enough data sets to make this really applicable out in the real world. So it works in the lab, but not in the real world. So what we did is we brought it out of the lab and into the real world, while retaining the accuracy, using similar methods, but dramatically expanding the data sets and testing it in all sorts of different lighting and all the different crazy things that people do in their home. When you say, hey, stand here, take this picture, turn the light on, you know you'd be surprised how many people are wearing a sweatshirt and have the light off. And again, I'm not poking fun at people sweatshirt and have the light off and again, I'm not poking fun at people. I understand life is complicated, but we've been able to make it more and more accurate and accessible for more and more conditions that ultimately make it useful for the everyday person now, and we're really excited about that because our goal is to bring it to the masses, so to speak, and so really what we're looking for is predictive value in these metrics. Are we going to run into challenges? Are we going to have more pain? Are we going to look good in our swimsuit? You know a hundred other things that people might be caring about with regard to their health, fitness and wellness. Wellness and so body composition.
Speaker 2:
If you listen to a lot of experts now who talk about longevity and aging and stuff, you start to hear this theme of the scale. Weight can be kind of misleading, right? So everyone's got a bathroom scale, or most people do. You can see the weight going up over the years for a lot of people Honestly, a lot of people are successful at losing weight temporarily as well, just not keeping it off, but regardless. What we've learned through the science over the years is that your weight has limited value, limited predictive value. It's actually your fat and fat distribution and muscle mass very important. That are strong predictors of longevity, health, well-being, energy, vitality, if you want to use some of these words to label it. But ultimately those then translate into less pain, better mobility, better, you know, able to get around as you're aging, as well as continuing to do the things you love, like maybe play sports or wrestle with your grandchildren or whatever.
Speaker 2:
And it's not always only about aging, necessarily. I know that's definitely important as part of this conversation but it's also about, like, what do you want to do tomorrow? Right? Like, do you want to be prepared and able to do the things that you want to do tomorrow? And getting some predictive value around that.
Speaker 2:
So I'll anchor this in one topic that I think is really interesting, and that's this word sarcopenia.
Speaker 2:
Generally speaking, it is a lack of adequate muscle mass and lack of adequate strength in your muscle tissue, and it's measured oftentimes by walking speed or grip strength or things like that.
Speaker 2:
Now, one thing that's clear is that, like many things, the threshold of becoming clinically diagnosed as sarcopenic or not is something that everyone wants to avoid.
Speaker 2:
Like you don't want to be near the threshold at all, right, like if you can't walk, you know, briskly, that's a pretty bad sign for quality of life. In fact, you want to be able to potentially even run for as long as you can, much less walk and grip strength as well. If you can't grip some basic items, quality of life is pretty poor. You want to be really far away from that, and so long story short is that measuring your body composition and understanding your lean mass relative to your fat mass can give you this really granular and accurate picture of am I heading towards, you know, a vital existence or kind of a rough existence, towards that sarcopenic end of the spectrum with lower lean mass and lower muscle strength, and it gives you something that's more objective and granular and easy to measure so that you can then make decisions kind of on a weekly basis or you know, something like that, versus waiting years to then see like, oh crap, you know, I don't have as much muscle as I want.
Speaker 2:
Now I'm kind of behind the eight ball and now I'm a little older and it's hard to build that muscle mass.
Speaker 2:
And the good news is is that, even though most of us aren't where we want to be and we kind of wish that we had done some things differently before, by measuring it, now there's a lot of things that you can do that are very small and stack up and prevent this on an ongoing basis, as well as even go in the completely opposite direction.
Speaker 2:
Which I like to kind of prefer to say is that, like on one end of the spectrum, you've got like, let's say, sarcopenia as disease. It's something that you get diagnosed with eventually if things go really bad but you don't want to be anywhere near that. Instead, you want to be spending your energy on the other end of the spectrum, which is how can I be the most vibrant and fit and, you know, tackling new things and living my life vibrantly? And this measurement tool lets you know not only where you are currently on the spectrum, but of all the things that you're doing day to day, week to week, is it moving the needle in the right direction or the wrong direction over time? And that's really what matters.
Speaker 1:
That's great, because sarcopenia is a big topic for this program or for this podcast, and for the content that I write with Prime Fit, content that I provide to gyms and fitness studios that are helping older people, because we all lose muscle as we age if we don't do something about it strength train in particular. I think that there's not enough awareness of that in the general public. We just think that becoming weak and frail is something that happens when you're old, necessarily, and it's not necessarily. There is something you can do about it. You can take care of yourself when you're old, necessarily, and it's not necessarily. There is something you can do about it. You can take care of yourself when you're younger, even when you're older. You can start when you're older and it'll still bring you some benefits. So it's good to have these kinds of tools to see where you're, where you are and where you're going, as you put it Right.
Speaker 2:
And the tricky thing too real quick on that is that when you get to extreme ends of the spectrum, it becomes obvious, right, yeah. And then that's usually when things like the healthcare system kick in, right, because something's not going well and quality of life is already low. And so the tricky thing is is that for many of us, there's a lot of signs well in advance of that that we can pay attention to, and the research shows that as much as 50% of people over the age of 50 are already starting to suffer from subclinical sarcopenia.
Speaker 2:
If you're like me, I always like to think I'm in the good half of 50 of the statistics or whatever, but let's just like be realistic for a second and say that like 50%, means that half of everyone listening to this one of it, if you and a friend together are listening to this one of you is likely in that camp, unless you're both already following all Jay's advice, of course.
Speaker 1:
But uh, well, yeah well, but you know, I think part of the problem is is the word muscle, because so many people hear that and think of Arnold Schwarzenegger or Sylvester Stallone, or or young boys at the beach, you know, with huge biceps and whatnot, and and they don't relate that to getting off the toilet. You know, that's the two extremes. Right there You've got, you know, a young man with bulging biceps and you've got a little old lady who can't get off the toilet. Those are the two extremes. That's muscle, being able to get up, and so that's, you know, a really compelling reason to be aware of where you're at and where you're going and how you can take better care of yourself. Now, a lot of the gyms and studios that listen to this have in-body machines, right? So how does this stack up to the in-body? Or? I have a smart scale in my bathroom that supposedly does determine some of these things. I have no idea how accurate it is, of course.
Speaker 2:
What's really what you want to look for in something like an in-body scale, for example, is that you have a great coach working with you that can help you navigate some of the nuances of the measurements coming out of these machines. So oftentimes, if you are strength training and getting adequate protein and following a good program, these machines can still be useful for tracking the relative change in something like body fat percentage over time, and so that can be a very useful tool, and if it's already in your gym or it's already something you've got access to, that's awesome gym or it's already something you've got access to.
Speaker 2:
That's awesome. People often kind of get a little bit confused by our messaging when it comes to what tool should I use Sprint or another tool and I'm always like use the tool that works for you. And so in our 10 years of history, especially on the HRV side, we've always been what we call device agnostic.
Speaker 1:
I want you to tell people where they can go to learn more about Spren, or go ahead and download the app and get started with you.
Speaker 2:
So Spren, like we said, you can find in the app store. If you just go type S-P-R-E-N. You can also go to sprencom pretty easy domain S-P-R-E-Ncom. We have more information there. And I will say that after 10 years in business and developing a lot of these technologies, the Spren app is now our flagship. That is bringing all of these technologies into one place. So we've had multiple product lines over time that are now consolidating into this. One experience and kind of our philosophy is we're trying to give as much data to people as possible for free and then, when it comes to premium upgrades and things like that, we're trying to pair products and services that help you actually improve your numbers, and that's where the premium comes in. And the other thing that we're really passionate about is empowering coaches and using this data to help empower practitioners and coaches to guide people. Essentially, you can kind of think about it as a tool in the toolkit to just understand where's this person at, where are they going, what's working, what's not working.
Speaker 1:
Okay, thank you, jason, it's been a pleasure, thanks very much. Thank you for listening to Optimal Aging. I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you'll subscribe, tell a friend and write a review. All of that helps me grow my audience. You can learn more about me and my content business at primefitcontentcom. You can send me an email at jay at primefitcontentcom. That's jay J-A-Y at primefitcontentcom. I'm also on Facebook, linkedin and Instagram, so you can find me anywhere you like and be in touch. And again, thanks for listening. Join me next time.