Health tech company Owaves recently launched the Wellness GPS. It’s a mobile application that lets users plan their day on a 24-hour sunrise clock while connecting it with a smartwatch. It alerts users when it’s time to exercise, eat, nap or perform some other task throughout the day.
The Wellness GPS is available on the iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch.
In an interview with MedCity News, founder and CEO Royan Kamyar said he designed the app for himself during business school.
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I was fresh out of my medical intern year in downtown Manhattan, and still reeling from the hectic lifestyle we led as training physicians. It frustrated me that we were teaching our patients the importance of a healthy, balanced lifestyle that included things like sleep, exercise and meditation, but doing none of these things ourselves.
According to Kamyar, Owaves helps users plan and focus their health and wellness goals.
For example, if you have to work eight hours today, but still want to make sure you sleep for eight hours, spend at least one hour doing exercise, eat three to five evenly spaced out meals, and maybe do a meditation, it can get tricky to map that all out in your head. With Owaves, you would take 30 to 50 seconds to drag and drop health activities form a colorful menu onto your personal 24-hour sunrise clock.
By using the smartwatch, users get an ongoing visual to check their health status throughout the day.
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The mobile app is currently free on the App Store for all platforms. The company is continuing to build a marketplace with premium versions that will require a subscription fee.
Kamyar said Owaves is self-funded through January 2015, operating on a family and friends round of financing. So far, the app has 20,000 global downloads and over 500,000 activities have been scheduled on the system, helping build an international wellness community.
As part of a company statement earlier this year, Jack Young, head of the Qualcomm Life Fund at Qualcomm Ventures, said it was the best app for wearables he’s seen.
Kamyar still considers Owaves an early-stage company. “There is much more we need to do to bring the full vision of Wellness GPS to life,” he said.
Out of the many day-planning apps on the market, Owaves has focused on normal day-to-day plans as well as activities like sleep, nutrition and stress management, needed for users to lead a long, healthy life.
Kamyar said, “Our goal is to help you prioritize these life-sustaining activities alongside traditional work and errands.”
He added: “Existing fitness and activity trackers are almost always retrospective in nature- showing you historical data, or what you’ve done already,” Kamyar points out.
We know from experience that in the trenches of positive lifestyle change and management, it is almost always a forward-looking perspective first. It is a prospective process- in which you are constantly planning the next meal, the next work-out, etc. The tracking should be secondary, from our point-of-view.
Photo: Owaves
