Bostinno
Boston startup aims to offer Netflix-style recommendations for health care
By: Emma Campbell
Juli, a new health data tracking app, is hoping to offer a Netflix-style recommendation algorithm to help individuals manage their chronic conditions and provide recommendations for improving well-being.
Bettina Hein, the founder and former CEO of Pixability, a fast-growing Boston-based software firm focused on optimizing marketing campaigns on video platforms like Facebook and YouTube, is Juli's CEO. She has a personal reason for starting her new company: Her first daughter was born premature.
Hein recalls she had trouble sleeping in the first year and a half after the baby's birth. "I started with this Cambridge startup called Zeo," she said. "At the time, they had this headband to monitor your sleep and I started monitoring my sleep and trying to really hack myself back to health. As it turns out, the doctors thought that I probably had atypical postpartum depression."
From that, she learned that data could be correlated to help with health, and Juli was born.
Founded in March 2020, Juli is currently beta testing its product. In May, the company is hoping to begin its first clinical trial with University College London.
Her company's app pulls data from four sources to learn about a user's health history. The sources include electronic health records, patient-reported data, the overall environment and from wearables like smartphones, smartwatches and scales.
Juli then uses artificial intelligence to combine this information, creating a health status for users. The app analyzes patterns and correlations within the data—which can shed light on possible factors that are affecting an individual’s well-being.
Hein hopes the Juli app will eventually be able to also provide recommendations for improving these chronic conditions.
Recently, the company launched the first version of its app, which allows users to view a dashboard of their health data. The app also includes a chat interface that speaks with users and a journal function. In the next iteration of the app, the company will add health recommendations and goal tracking.
The idea for providing health recommendations actually came from targeted advertising. “In advertising, you could get all of these super personalized experiences," Hein said. "And there's all this contextual targeting, personalized targeting and I was like, ‘why don't we use that to do something even more meaningful?’”
Besides receiving daily status updates about your health, users also receive health questionnaires, which are used to gather additional information on a user’s condition.
“Every day we ask you a couple of questions...so you have all of this other data coming in, then we add patient-reported data about how you're feeling, how many times you've taken an inhaler," she said. "Then we look at that and see where correlations happen. And we have this conversational interface, where that comes into play. And then every two weeks, we give you sort of a little diagnostic questionnaire where you sort of really go into depth and see, has your status improved? Or has it deteriorated?"
Hein isn't just working on Juli. She also recently joined the cast of "Höhle der Löwen"—the Swiss adaptation of "Shark Tank.
“I like to brag that I've never had a real job,” Hein said. “I started a text to speech software company (called SVOX), out of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. And so I raised $8 million for that. And we sold the company for $125 million to Nuance Communications, from Burlington, Massachusetts. And then I went to MIT to get a Masters of Science there. And out of MIT, I founded Pixability, which is a video advertising optimization company. I did that for 10 years.”
With her background in data analytics, artificial intelligence and optimization, Hein said she now gets to apply what she’s learned from her previous businesses to a venture that she’s passionate about.
Asked what was one of the biggest lessons she's learned form her past ventures, she said entrepreneurs need to pick a business that ignites passion because they’ll be working on that one venture for longer than they think.
“You have to understand when you're doing something like this, that you're embarking on a 10-year journey," she said. "When I was a young entrepreneur, I thought in 18 months we'll be rocking and rolling on this, and it took 10 years to get to an exit. So when you pick something, you have to be really passionate about it, you have to be willing to see it through."
