Noosheen Hashemi, Founder & CEO of January.ai, joins Cheddar innovates to discuss how machine learning and wearable technology can help you improve your metabolism and monitor your glucose, and what this technology means for those with diabetes. 

Cheddar Innovates

How Machine Learning and A.I. Can Improve Your Metabolism

Welcome back to cheddar innovates brought to you by Curiosity stream. Everyone there are approximately 133 million people in the us with free diabetes or diabetes. Our next guest is creating technology to make it easier to access care and prevent disease like this. Using the latest artificial intelligence wearables and data attack to provide personalized recommendations to help you maintain a healthy lifestyle joining us now. New Sheen Hashemi founder and ceo of january Ai thank you so much for joining us. Your company january Ai uses machine learning to improve metabolic functions. Walk us through how exactly this works. Of course yes. We use power wearables aI and food data to help people understand what's happening inside their body and to take actions that are healthier. For example we are using um continuous glucose monitors and heart rate monitors. So continuous glucose monitors, you can see on the screen there's one on the right there are several other ones. And we're using heart rate monitors like your your apple watch or a Fitbit um to uh to understand what's happening. Think of it as sort of internet of the body. And to that we're adding user reported data in terms of what they're what they're eating. And after just a few days of training with heart rate, continuous glucose monitor and food data we are able to predict a person's glucose or sugar level two. Any food in our 19 million strong database. So four days of training able to predict your response to any food in our database. So um that means that if you um you ate let's say fried chicken and pizza while you were training on the data and now you want to know how you're going to respond to corn flakes. You're able to do that with our ai without actually having to eat corn flakes. So the brilliance of artificial intelligence is you essentially have a digital twin that can consume things for you and tell you how your body is going to react so you can make more mindful decisions about eating. Wait, this is really incredible. I have to ask you also, does this require the user to continuously do blood withdrawals? Um like we've seen with other products in the past. No, there's no blood draw at all. The the sensor essentially, there's a small needle in the sensor that when you're applying it um that essentially delivers a plastic, think of it as a catheter into your skin and it's just reading interstitial fluid which is correlated with your glucose. So there's actually no blood involved at all. Um And so, uh the interstitial fluid is a good surrogate. Um and it's it's telling you fairly accurately what your blood glucose level is. There's actually no, no, no needle, no blood um either in application of the sensor or throughout. Well, I think that in itself is a huge advancement moving forward and I want to kind of rewind for just a moment. If you could put into perspective how big of an issue diabetes is here in the us we had mentioned, you know about 133 million people here living with it. But um yeah, just give us a little bit more context with that. Absolutely, yes. So um there are 37 a half million people with diabetes today and 22% of them are undiagnosed. They don't even know they have it. And this is radically important. I'll get back to pre diabetes in a minute. This is so, so important because 40% of people that died of Covid had chronic conditions underlying conditions like diabetes. Um and so this is playing Russian roulette if you don't know that you have diabetes and you get something else like Covid and you die, it's a pretty serious thing. Um Prediabetes, there are 96 million people are believed to have prediabetes and most of them don't know it. Um so in the us we have a huge screening problem. We don't screen for metabolic disease unless someone is over 40 and um you know clinically considered obese or is complaining of symptoms of some kind. Um this is why, you know, 90 million people in America have diabetes and prediabetes and have no idea. Um the problem with not knowing is that if you're not managing your blood sugar well. Um and you get you become sicker. So um as you progress, there are ramifications for eyesight for your nerve system for getting cardiovascular disease for getting you know, other kinds of diseases that other Organ diseases. So it's quite serious and and as the disease progresses you develop comorbidities and you know, 30 million Americans have five comorbidities or more. Um and that's really that's one of the one of the yeah, really incredible. I think especially when you talk about this under the lens of the pandemic and covid, but just allowing access for people um to gain real insights about their health data. That's new Sheen Hashemi, founder and ceo of january. Ai. Thank you so much for joining us.