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Sharecare plans to launch platform for emotional selfies in Q1 2016

Sharecare plans to launch its consumer facing health assessment platform in the first quarter of 2016.

Voice is the truth. That was something that Jeff Arnold, co-founder, chairman, CEO and of Sharecare, said repeatedly in an interview at Health 2.0 this week. It sounded faintly religious. It’s a reference to the way the company is using voice as a kind of emotional selfie for consumers and for its healthcare partners as a biomarker for underlying disease states and conditions. Arnold offered a glimpse of some of the company’s short and long-term plans.

Arnold co-founded the business with Dr. Mehmet Oz, in partnership with Harpo Productions, Sony Pictures Television and Discovery Communications in 2010.

It has 10,000 participants in a beta test of its stress assessment app for Android, according to Arnold. It expects to release the results of a study carried out by Georgia Tech by the end of the year.

The goal is a network for episodic and everyday health risk assessments. It wants to provide a way for users to track their data, not only through the app’s voice analysis technology, but eventually through activity trackers and wearables, such as smartwatches. It wants to help them and their providers identify patterns that could point to a source of stress or decline in a user’s health. It expects the platform to be ready for launch by the end of the first quarter of 2016, Arnold said.

Looking ahead Sharecare is exploring ways to provide an API so that a broad range of developers can plug into its platform.

“We want to have a very scalable operating platform,” Arnold said.

The company has three main sources of paying customers, according to Arnold: providing data to life science companies; providers, some of which are also financial backers like HCA and CHE Trinity Health; and employers — namely the U.S. Department of Defense.

Arnold said the company currently has 800 employees. In April it raised $25 million — a move that help it add 150 staff over a 12 month timeframe. To date, it has raised about $160 million.

At some point, Arnold said Sharecare wants to have an innovation lab that would leverage its voice technology. By assessing the fractal patterns of people’s voices — the intensity of the voice and where it drops, Arnold said research scientists could factor that information to assess people for conditions such as Parkinson’s disease, dementia, and other neurological disorders. Those are the kind of conversations it is having with pharmaceutical companies.

When Sharecare got its start, one of its greatest advantages was having a co-founder with a national talk show. Despite being part of two separate companies, Oz, by hosting his own television show, has helped raise Sharecare’s profile and raised awareness of digital health tools, from companies such as telemedicine business American Well, StiKK, Fitocracy, Azumio and Sharecare’s own product, AskMD, although he clarified his affiliation, according to a Sharecare spokeswoman.

After months of being the target of criticism over appearing to recommend healthcare products that hadn’t been clinically validated, Oz has shifted the show’s focus to make use of academic experts. Although Oz has defended himself, there’s a risk that the negative focus on Oz’s brand could undermine Sharecare’s ambitions.

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