Healthcare entrepreneur and a former new product development director at Johnson & Johnson Siva Raj is tapping into the smart bike trend with a twist. Revvo wants to focus on newly diagnosed patients with chronic conditions, particularly people with cardiovascular disease and Type 2 diabetes and those at risk for developing these diseases.
Raj said he decided to start the digital health company because of a family history with cardiovascular disease. His father had three heart attacks and his own blood pressure was beginning to get high.
Its stationary bike uses bio-adaptive technology to help users improve their fitness in stages. It evaluates metabolic equivalent of task, the length of time and frequency of each session. The idea is to gradually increase the challenge of the workout. It wants to do that in a way that respects the reality that most people have a limited amount of time to devote to exercise and may not have the luxury of going to a gym because of family or economic constraints. Raj also said it was important to develop a way to encourage people to exercise in a way that challenges them each time, but doesn’t discourage users early on so they work out haphazardly and eventually quit.
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A companion app helps users track their performance and they can choose to share that data with their physician.
The focus on METs is a bit of a contrast with wearables on the market that focus on things like calories burned, steps walked and distance. Some debate the merits of those factors over METs. In a phone interview with MedCity News, Raj explained that although wearables tend to focus on increasing activity, Revvo focuses on improving fitness — cardio-respiratory fitness to be precise.
“There is compelling scientific evidence showing that even small increases in fitness can have a greater impact on your health than becoming the most activate person on the planet. And by guiding users to work out at just the right intensity we’re able to quickly improve their fitness — achieving in six weeks what would normally take six months or longer,” he said.
Its focus on boosting cardio-respiratory fitness to improve cardiovascular health ties in with the American Heart Association’s 2020 impact goals. In a policy statement, AHA called attention to studies conducted over the past two decades that cardio-respiratory fitness was a stronger predictor of adverse outcomes than traditional risk factors — hypertension, smoking, obesity, hyperlipidemia, and type 2 diabetes.”CRF has been shown to be a more powerful predictor of risk than other exercise test variables,” the statement said.
At Johnson & Johnson, Raj was global director of new product development and where he said he invented pattern alert technology. The technology is used in a blood glucose monitor that tries to reduce excessive alerts by identifying patterns of high and low glucose patterns relevant to each patient.
