Transcript: Self-Care Sleep.AI, Solius Labs, Healthnix

This is the transcript for the Rethinking Aging Club Podcast episode recorded July 23, 2026.

Episode Title: Self-Care Sleep.AI, Solius Labs, Healthnix

Recorded: July 23, 2026 / Published August 10, 2026

Guests:

Colin Lawlor, Founder and CEO, Sleep.ai

Christopher (Chris) Kiple, CEO, Solius Labs

Maja Mazur, Co-Founder and CEO, Healthnix

Co-hosts:

Linda Sherman, Managing Editor Boomer Tech Talk, Rethinking Aging Club podcasts founder and executive producer

Ray Gordon, architect, urban planner, futurist, former Pratt Institute grad school professor and avid science reader.

Debbie Howard, caregiver advocate, co-founder, Tokyo-based AgeTech platform Living Best.

Show Notes: Self-Care Sleep.AI.Solius Labs, Healthnix

Linda Sherman 00:05

Welcome to the Rethinking Aging Club show. I am Linda Sherman. Each week, we host presentations and discussion with special guest experts on an important topic in the field of rethinking aging. We’ll be introducing this week’s co-hosts and guests during the show. We’re happy you’ve joined us.

Today is July 23, 2026, and we are honoring International Self-Care Day, which is July 24. Our self-care-themed show today covers three important areas of longevity, wellness, and self-care: sleep health, the health benefits of precision sunlight, and nutrition for pain management. We have three wonderful expert speakers for you today: Colin Lawlor, the founder and CEO of Sleep.ai; Christopher Kiple, the CEO of Solius Labs; and Maja Mazur, the co-founder and CEO of Healthnix.

I’m going to introduce my two co-hosts, and then we will begin the show with Colin. First of all, please allow me to introduce Debbie Howard. Debbie Howard is a marketing and communications strategist with over 40 years of experience, including decades of work in Japan. She co-founded the Tokyo-based AgeTech platform Living Best, which uses consumer insights to guide innovation and go-to-market execution. She is also a caregiver-friendly workplace strategist and author of two books on caregiving. Through both Living Best and her company, Aging Matters International, she participates in the AgeTech Collaborative from AARP.

Ray Gordon is an architect, urban planner, futurist, and prior graduate school professor at both Pratt Institute and NYU. Ray brings a unique perspective to scientific aging-related topics

Ray Gordon 02:36

And I’d like to introduce Linda Sherman, who’s the founder and executive producer of the News for the Ages podcast and the Rethinking Aging Club podcast, a participant in the AgeTech Collaborative from AARP. She is managing editor of Boomer Tech Talk, home of the club’s podcast. Linda previously served as CEO and CMO for multinational subsidiaries in Japan and now serves as chief longevity officer for LA-based Miracle of the Sea. She helps people understand the best research products and conversations in aging, longevity, caregiving, and AgeTech. Linda is also a role model for healthy longevity, staying physically fit while embracing aging with curiosity, purpose, and community. Take it away, Linda.

Linda Sherman 03:20

Thank you so much, Ray Gordon. Please allow me to introduce Colin Lawlor. Colin Lawlor is a globally recognized leader in sleep science and digital health, with over 30 years of executive experience, 15 of them dedicated to redefining how we measure, understand, and improve sleep.

As founder and CEO of Sleep.ai and former executive at ResMed, Colin has pioneered some of the most scientifically validated sleep technologies in both consumer and clinical markets, including the first contactless sonar-based sleep tracking systems, originally from Ireland and a graduate of Trinity College Dublin, and Colin is speaking to us today from Dublin. He firmly believes that a pint of Guinness may be good for you, but having one too many will definitely impact your sleep. Sleep AI is also a portfolio company of the AgeTech Collaborative from AARP.

Colin Lawlor, please. Thank you.

Colin Lawlor 04:39

Hey, thanks so much, everybody, and what a pleasure! So, it’s funny that we’re going to talk today, amongst other things, about, you know, daylight savings. I’m in Dublin, Ireland, today. Normally, I live in San Diego, California. Because I’m a little bit further away from the equator and much further north, well, here in Ireland it stays bright in the middle of the summer, all the way through 11 p.m. or so. And in the morning it’s bright at maybe 4:30 in the morning. But in the winter it’s the opposite; it’s dark for much of the time. So I know very well from personal experience what effect that has on me. So I’m hightailing it back to SoCal in a few days. But all joking aside, let’s talk a little bit about Sleep.ai. Who are we, and what are we doing, and why are we doing it, most importantly?

So, Sleep.ai, we originally spun our company out of ResMed and our focus is to leverage data and science to improve sleep for everybody. And that means to improve or manage anything like sleep, we have to be able to measure it. So, as you rightly said, and thank you, Linda. We developed a suite of technologies that enable us to measure sleep, even for people that don’t have a wearable. So, we are completely device-agnostic. Once we have access to a mobile phone, we can understand quite a lot about a person’s sleep. If we can layer in and add in other data, like, for example, from wearables, we can use that data to understand what’s happening with their sleep and work then with them to improve it.

Both in terms of coaching those people to help you to get better sleep yourself, but also recognizing that sleep is multifactorial. It’s complex. Many things influence sleep, so there’s no single shot which is going to improve it for everybody. And there may be environmental factors; there may be behavioral factors. People may suffer from sleep disorders that have not yet been diagnosed or treated, or, you know, we’re going to talk, obviously, a little later, for example, about pain. If you’ve got pain, it’s very difficult to sleep. So, the point being that we really need to understand the person, how they sleep, and all of the factors that are influencing them if we want to help them to sleep better. And we do that leveraging data and science.

And over the years, we have now collected more than 1 billion hours of sleep data from way more than 1.5 million people, and that’s growing very rapidly as we speak. But we don’t just collect the data; we also run studies on the various interventions of any and every type that can affect sleep so that we can understand and therefore make better recommendations.

And why are we doing it? The last part. Well, we’re doing it because we truly believe that sleep is probably one of the most modifiable or changeable factors in your long-term health. Because we have always believed that without better sleep, we can’t actually achieve our potential. We can’t reduce our risk of accidents. We can’t increase our productivity. Sleep drives everything. But in the long term, it also drives our risk of pretty much every major chronic disease. And this is why we get out of bed in the mornings: to help people to make their sleep better.

And I’ll just give you one or two quick statistics from recent studies, which I think will illuminate the conversation. The first one is from JAMA Neurology a couple of years ago, and in that particular paper, which was based on a long-term health study in the UK, it is now possible for us to see that small changes, for example, in deep sleep as we age, particularly from the age of 60 onwards. So, as little as 1% reduction in deep sleep each year results in a 27% increase in the risk of dementia, as an example. 1% of deep sleep, by the way, for the average person in that age group—and I’m getting there myself—is one to two minutes. So we know that when it comes to brain health, cardiovascular health, and pretty much everything else in our bodies and minds, sleep is a driver of either good or bad outcomes. And so our focus is on using the data and the science to understand how to help each person make their sleep better.

What we have been doing with that data is using the data to drive not just behavioral improvements. So understanding for each person what changes that they can make in their lives that can improve their sleep, but also using the data available from people’s phones to understand their risk of the major sleep disorders. So, for example, many, many people on the call will be very familiar with obstructive sleep apnea, and as many as 20% of the population suffer from obstructive sleep apnea. However, many of those people that suffer from that condition are not diagnosed and not treated. So, helping to understand who they are so we can help them onto the appropriate care pathway, but equally, there is almost as many people globally. Approximately 850 million people suffer from chronic insomnia, and mostly that is a condition which is also not diagnosed or treated. It may indeed be self-treated, so you’ll witness, as you go to the drugstore in the United States, for example, a vast array of medications that people are prescribing for themselves because they’re available over the counter, trying to deal with conditions like chronic insomnia. But there are other conditions like restless leg syndrome, which I suffer from, and restless leg syndrome equally, without it being treated, it causes us to wake up during the night, and that interrupts our sleep in which, going back to the earlier point about the importance of sleep in long-term chronic disease management and risk, that’s not a good thing. So, essentially, we’ve been developing technology that enables us to measure the effect of specific interventions and also to screen people for the risk of sleep disorders.

Now, all of that we put into a smartphone because our thinking is everybody in the world almost has a smartphone. Some people like to wear a ring. Some people like to wear a wearable on their wrist. Other people have smart beds that track data about their sleep. But all of those devices give different answers. And even though some people choose to track with these things, the reality is that most people do not measure their sleep every night. So we believe in using the data available from those wearables wherever that is available and then supplementing that with data we can collect from people’s phones, and you mentioned at the very beginning the sonar technology. And if I may just geek out about that for a moment, that’s just one of many ways that we measure sleep. But how that works is a little bit like how a bat navigates in a cave. The bat emits some audio, and it measures the response time to its ear, and it uses that to navigate at speed, even though it actually has no eyes and cannot see. So it’s a principle of echolocation. We use high-frequency sound waves above the range of hearing, so you can’t hear them. They don’t disturb you or anybody else in the environment. We measure how long each sound wave takes to return to the phone; there’s no audio, there’s no listening. Using that, we can see every breath and every movement, and that’s enough for us to reliably score sleep.

So the power of that is that if you have a wearable, that’s great. We can take that data. If you have no wearable, you probably do have a phone. We can use that instead. The bottom line being, our goal is to understand for everybody how they’re sleeping in the real world with a high degree of accuracy and then use that data to understand how best to help them.

Linda Sherman 12:31

I see on your website that you have the app for individuals, and you also have the sleep score lab for industry. Can you talk about what you’re doing for industry?

Colin Lawlor 12:47

Yes, of course. Look, if you think about it, for industry, if you are trying to help a person to lose weight, or to get fit, or to manage a chronic disease, the outcomes that you are trying to achieve are significantly affected by how that person is sleeping, and for the most part, you don’t have the data or the expertise to help them with that aspect of their health or chronic disease management. So we provide sleep AI inside as a piece of software that those partners can build into their apps and services.

But we also provide access to research and development services for people who are developing solutions for sleep. So, for companies that are developing new interventions, they may be new drugs, new supplements, scents. They may be pillows. They may be environmental systems for the home, like air purification systems, and those companies need data to understand how those products affect sleep, if at all. And so we provide that as a service to companies.

So essentially, what we’re doing is we’re providing the data and the intelligence to companies where sleep affects their business on the one side and also where there is data that will be helpful to them in developing better solutions so that they can develop those solutions, but also bring those to market with confidence because they know that they actually work.

Linda Sherman 14:13

And you also have APIs that are available. Correct?

Colin Lawlor 14:20

That’s correct. So going back to the former, the APIs make it possible for any company which has a digital app to quickly and easily build sleep into their offering so that they understand how sleep is affecting their end patient or consumer. But also, they can stream the advice, the coaching, and the screening for disorders into their service seamlessly, so they don’t have to become sleep experts as well. They can leverage the technology that Sleep.ai provides, and that’s obviously both of these parts of our business are growing quite substantially.

And you know, we believe that, to be honest, you cannot achieve anything, from blood sugar control to managing a chronic disease to losing weight or to getting pregnant. It doesn’t matter. Sleep is actually going to drive the outcomes, and when you’re blind to it as a company, you can’t influence those outcomes. So you need to forgive me, but to come out of the dark and see the light and understand that sleep is a big driver in your business, whether you know it or not. So we provide those services to make it easy for companies to do that, and then they don’t have to build all of that capability themselves.

Linda Sherman 15:34

And once they are connected to you, you will continue updating your database, and they will be automatically updated. Is that correct?

Colin Lawlor 15:45

Yes, exactly. So what is happening is we use data on an anonymized basis. So we don’t use any personally identifiable data. We use it on an anonymized basis to build more and more predictive models. So they enable us to leverage the data that’s available to identify patterns that can then be deployed to help everybody else and advance the science.

So for that reason, for those companies, they share that data with us. We help them by providing the outcomes and the advice that they can offer to their customers, and then we continue to build and expand our predictive algorithms and analytics, which then become very useful and available to everybody who needs better sleep.

And you know, on the back of that, we’ve been extensive scientific publishers. And what we’re very proud of is that this year we published our 102nd paper at the American Academy of Sleep Medicine meeting in Baltimore. And why is that important? It’s because we think that sleep is so important; it deserves the rigor, and it deserves to be published. If the data is useful and insights can be valuable, that should be published.

So we’re voracious publishers, and our goal being to advance understanding about how to actually improve sleep, but grounded in the science.

Linda Sherman 17:03

Do our other two geeky CEOs, Chris and Maja, have any questions or comments for Colin? Chris.

Chris Kiple 17:14

Colin, what’s the single thing that you recommend? You know, for all of us to improve our sleep on a day-to-day basis, what’s the one intervention that you’ve done that helps you get that one to two minutes of extra deep sleep?

Colin Lawlor 17:27

I love it, Chris. You get me going now. There’s a few universal truths, not so many, but a few. Otherwise, many of the things are highly personalized are dependent on your individual circumstances and sleep patterns. But one thing that’s absolutely true for everybody is the higher the amount of consistency, the better the sleep outcomes. And you know, it doesn’t take a genius to work that out because, for example, on my trip over here to Europe from SoCal, first few days I’m jet-lagged, and that’s because my sleep pattern is completely disrupted. And so that’s true of everybody. Changes in the time that we go to bed and wake up are not good. Our bodies don’t like change. We need consistency. So that’s universally true. The more consistent you can be, the better your sleep will be.

There are one or two others, though, which are also helpful. The first one is we have seen that there’s a direct, straight-line correlation between sleep and bedroom temperature. So, for example, we usually see that for the vast majority of people, the lower the temperature between 62 and 68 in the bedroom, the higher the quality of sleep. If it goes below that, do we see negative outcomes? If it goes above that, we see negative outcomes. But basically, between 62 and 68, the lower the better, and that’s almost universally true. And you know, for that analysis, we looked at, you know, three to 4 million nights of sleep data and published on that too.

I should also mention that that’s becoming a factor today, Chris, because we have, you know, changes in the environment. So we were running a very major randomized controlled trial in Germany a number of years ago, and the last couple of weeks of that trial, with 500 participants, took place in the middle of one of the worst heat waves ever recorded. And surprise, surprise, we saw an immediate heat-related effect because, of course, people in Germany tend not to have air conditioning at home.

So those universal truisms we see are consistent across very large data sets, and so for you or for me, thinking about that and what I try to do as much as I possibly can is to keep my bedtime consistency, and then I have a sophisticated jet lag management program that I can share later for anybody interested.

Linda Sherman 19:40

I would like to ask you what you found that helps with restless leg syndrome.

Colin Lawlor 19:47

Yes, in short, I have four interventions that, altogether for me work. But before we talk about me, anybody that is suffering from restless leg syndrome, slight bias towards females rather than males, but anybody that’s suffering from the condition, the first thing you should probably consider doing is getting a blood test, because for some people it can be explained and treated by simple iron supplementation. So that’s the first thing. Take a look at your last set of bloods. If they’re low, then maybe iron supplementation is the answer.

If it’s not that, and like it is in my case, it’s a neurological condition. I’ve spent years measuring my sleep, 16 years now. I’ve many 1000s and 1000s of nights of data on me. For me, I’ve implemented a very very strict caffeine restriction: 12 p.m. And honestly, it’s quite amazing. You know, for example, last week I got to Germany for a meeting, and I was quite tired. And I succumbed to a cup of espresso at about 3 o’clock in the afternoon. And you know what? I should have been extremely tired, but I woke up several times in the night more than usual because I drank that, and I know it was that. So for me, 12 p.m. no caffeine after then for me. For some people, caffeine has no effect, but for me, it’s a driver.

And then two other things: I have a sound machine because with restless leg syndrome, you may wake up. When you wake up, you’re more sensitive to the sounds in the environment. And most of us live in or near a city, and so there’s always some kind of noise out there, even in the home, perhaps. So something to mask that consistently helps, you know, in those situations. I also use a weighted blanket when I’m at home. I obviously can’t bring it with me, but I use it when I’m at home.

And then the final thing for me: I take the lowest dose of gabapentin, the drug originally prescribed to me 10 to 15 years ago, and I didn’t want to take it, so I didn’t. But when I added it to the other regime, I’ve substantially improved my own sleep, and I’m delighted to say my sleep scores are typically, except for the jet lag occasions, they’re now typically running in the lower to mid 80s, which is a huge achievement for me. I started in the 50s and 60s.

Linda Sherman 22:01

Thank you so much, Colin Lawlor. That was very, very interesting, and we could go on forever, but we do want to get on to our two other speakers.

Please allow me to introduce Chris Kiple. Christopher Kiple, the CEO of Solius, is a leader in innovative medical technology. He serves as chair of the board at Lungpacer Medical and is a member of the campaign committee at the National Geographic Society. As former CEO of Ventec Life Systems, he led that company from R&D to over $800 million in global sales and more than 1,000 employees. He co-developed VOCSN, the world’s first multifunction ventilator, and forged a landmark partnership with General Motors to scale critical care ventilator production times 80 in under six months during the COVID-19 pandemic. Earlier in his career, Chris worked in finance at J.P. Morgan and Law at Sidley Austin. He holds degrees in international affairs and law from the George Washington University.

I had the pleasure of meeting Chris Kiple in person, as well as the opportunity to see their product and a presentation at a private dinner that Solius did for journalists during the January 2026 Consumer Electronics Show, or CES. They had to cancel their CES booth because of FDA clearance timing. Obviously, we at the dinner were embargoed from talking about Solius in advance of that. Congratulations to Solius for getting that unique FDA clearance, and thank you so much for being here today, Chris. You have an exciting product.

Chris Kiple 23:55

Well, thank you, Linda. It’s a pleasure to be here. As you mentioned, we did just get our FDA clearance for Solius, which is the first over-the-counter UVB light therapy device that is personally dosed to your specific skin tone, and that matters because we all respond to the sun differently. Lighter-skinned individuals are more efficient at absorbing UV light. That means they need a shorter dose. Individuals with darker skin complexion need more UVB light to get the clinical benefits. So there’s a really important component to dosing UVB based on your skin tone and genetics.

So Solius has been at the forefront of this conversation of understanding. Does sunlight matter? Is sunlight healthy? Is sunlight safe? And I think we’ve all heard these conversations, and we’ve all been told. I can still hear my mother’s voice every single day, telling me to wear sunscreen every single morning when I wake up to prevent the signs of aging and wrinkles, but also to avoid getting sunburned, and that’s been my guiding principle. When I go to the beach, I’m fully covered up.

As I started to get into this space and started to really read the clinical evidence around sunlight exposure, a few things really started to stick out to me. There was a Swedish study of 30,000 individuals, and it found that individuals who had more sun exposure lived 2.1 years longer than those that didn’t. So that means that people who aren’t getting a lot of sun exposure are living 2.1 years less. That’s impact equivalent to someone who smokes cigarettes.

And so when you start to think about this, the Journal of Internal Medicine actually published a report that said avoidance of sunshine is as substantial to your longevity as smoking cigarettes. And at first, you start to think about that, and you say, “Well, maybe there’s other confounding variables.” And another study in the United Kingdom of 500,000 individuals, they directly linked sun exposure to lower all-cause mortality, and they controlled for things like weight, exercise, education, income, and so forth. And still found those that had more sun exposure lived longer.

And so we started to really look at this and think, how could we approach sunlight, and how could we approach the data around sunlight differently? And so that’s where we came up with the idea and following the science to recreate UVB light. And UVB light, you know, we all think about UVB light, and we think about the sunshine. We think about a couple of things. We think about vitamin D, and sure enough, yes. When you are exposed to the sun, and when you’re exposed to a Solius device, you see significant increases in your vitamin D. And vitamin D is, of course, tremendously important.

But when you start to really dive into a lot of the studies on vitamin D, it’s not the whole story. It is one of many things that happen to your body when you’re exposed to the sun. The ones I always like to talk about are, first and foremost, hormone production. So when you and I go out in the sun, we feel better. That feeling when you’re in a sunny day or when the sun rises, and you have a happy mood—well, that’s not a placebo. That’s actually hormone production—serotonin and dopamine directly related to being exposed to the sun. So hormone production is a big deal. That serotonin and dopamine are what help prevent many of us from getting seasonal affective depression in the wintertime. They also help improve our cognition. They also can be helpful for our neurotransmitters and to prevent dementia. So there’s a whole component just around mood, cognition, how we function, and neuroprotection associated with the sun.

The second thing that we see with UVB light therapy and sunlight is we see significant changes in our microbiome, and that’s both on the skin, but also in our gut. We tend to think of ourselves as one person, but actually, we’re comprised of around 36 trillion different organisms, and those organisms, those microbiome that makes up our entire body, and that is what dictates a lot of our health and lifespan. And so, UVB light we found to be tremendously important to fostering not only a healthy but more diverse microbiome in the gut and the skin, and that we have found to be directly related to anti-inflammation, which is directly associated with longevity and kind of the holy grail of improving our health span.

And the third thing we see is nitric oxide release, and nitric oxide release is really fundamental to our cardiovascular system. So when you eat good fruits and vegetables, you get that nitrogen oxide, and then you’ve got to release it in your skin. This is why we know that your blood pressure is lowest in the summer and it’s lowest at the equator. It’s because you’re getting that more long-term release of nitric oxide in your skin. So hormone production, gut microbiome, nitric oxide release that has significant impact in your body. It really helps drive an entire system response, and so we see things obviously like your brain and mood. We see improvements in neuroprotection and your cognition.

We see things like improvements in your bone density. So vitamin D is fundamental to obviously having strong bones over your life. A lot of us can take oral supplements. Some of us can’t. Some of us can’t increase our vitamin D very well with using oral supplementation alone, and so getting UVB light to drive that makes a huge improvement in our vitamin D level. So the average user on Soliuseil sees about a 76% increase in their vitamin D. That’s really important. We all have heard the conversations about gut health and microbiome, so we see really important improvements there. Your heart and cardiovascular health. We see that with your blood pressure. We see that with the nitric oxide release and your cardiovascular function. And then we see things like performance and recovery. So more UVB light is directly associated with increased VO2 max, which becomes really important not just for professional athletes, but as well for as we age, so there’s a whole host of things, as well as your skin. People have obviously used UVB light prescription settings for psoriasis and eczema.

So the whole point here, if I could leave you with nothing at all, is that sunlight is not just fundamental to life; it’s actually fundamental to each of our lives and our well-being. The challenge has always been, how do we do that safely? How do we do that without getting burned? And that’s really where Solius has come in.

Our UVB light therapy device gives you 12 times the benefit, the health benefits of UVB light per minute of exposure as compared to the sun, and it does it with 99% less carcinogenic risk, total UV risk. And more importantly, we dose it to your skin so that we deliver an effective, clinically effective UVB dose to your skin without the risk of burning, tanning, or sun damage. And so that’s really what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to make this easier, safer for everyone. And that really I think has the potential to be a really simple intervention that we can all make to improve our health and lifespan. And more importantly than that, it’s an intervention that we can do that’s personalized to us and do it in a safe way.

I think the challenge that I have in this debate that we all have; yes, it’s great to go out and get the sun, and I tell everyone every day I talk to how important the sun is. And I’ve read several great books recently. If you’re more interested in this topic, read Rowan Jacobson’s *In Defense of Sunlight*. It’s a fantastic read. But you know, I have so many friends. We’re based in Seattle as a company who read about all these benefits, and they start to understand. Hey, the sun is more, and there are 1000s of studies on sunlight, vitamin D, UVB light that are clinically available and published. They want to go out and get sun, and what, of course, happens is they go and they sit outside and they get a sunburn.

And so, the one thing I can caution you about is you do not want to get sunburned. That is directly related to skin cancer and melanomas; you don’t want to get sunburned, but you do want to get the UVB dose. You can do that with Solius. You can do a dose to you. You can do it without the risk of sunburn, and you can do it in one therapy, less than five minutes a week. And I’ll pause there, Linda, and let you ask any questions.

Linda Sherman 32:17

Can you just talk very briefly on how it works for psoriasis and eczema? That’s a very frustrating skin condition that people deal with.

Chris Kiple 32:32

Absolutely. So psoriasis, vitiligo, eczema are all skin conditions that are associated with autoimmune functions, and they can be really challenging to treat. The current path to treat them in other prescription drugs. Some of those prescription drugs have been found most recently in clinical studies. They can actually contribute to skin cancer. There has been narrow UV band light that has been used in a phototherapy setting with dermatologists that you can get in a prescription setting. Solius is the first UVB light therapy that’s available over the counter. So it takes what has been used in a dermatologist setting at the direction of the dermatologist and brings it into the home.

And what we are seeing anecdotally in a lot of our studies that individuals with eczema or psoriasis are seeing a really beneficial systemic response in their body, particularly in that gut and skin microbiome relationship, that’s really helping eliminate the psoriasis, vitiligo, and eczema from their systems. So we’re really excited to see that. We’re launching a few clinical studies with the National Psoriasis Foundation to really explore the true impacts on this. But really excited with the data that we have so far and really think this can be a really simple, proactive therapy that people can do every single week to really prevent those flare-ups over time, or at least mitigate them over time.

But yes, Linda, it’s a great question. I think this can have a really big impact on people with skin conditions.

Linda Sherman 33:52

Okay, do we have any questions from anybody else?

Maja Mazur 33:57

I’d love to ask a question, actually. I have recently moved from London to Texas, so as you can imagine, sun exposure is very, very different. And so I’ve been increasingly thinking about, you know, what’s good, what’s bad, where do I strike the balance? Is there any amount of time that we can spend in that more, you know, kind of harsher sunlight outside without risking skin cancers, skin irritation, or is this very personalized? What’s your advice there for those who live in the sunnier parts of the world?

Chris Kiple 34:35

It’s a great question. You are asking the eternal question of how do you dose sunlight, and the challenge is, it comes down to a lot of variables. It comes down to the time of the year. So obviously, summertime and wintertime are very different. It comes down to your geographic location. So you reference Texas and United Kingdom, very different UVB exposures. Obviously, Texas has a lot more UVB than United Kingdom.

And then of course you get into variables time of day. You really need to be outside to get the UVB benefits around lunchtime, and you need to have your shirt off. You know enough surface area of your skin to be exposed to the sunlight to really get the systemic benefits. And you need to be perpendicular to the sun. So we all spend a lot of time outside walking. We’re often covered. We’ve got sunscreen on. You really need to have your skin perpendicular to the sun to get those benefits. So those are some things to think about just from a situational environment perspective.

And then you also have certain components that we all respond to the sun differently. So your specific skin tone is going to respond differently than, for example, my skin tone, and there’s different risk factors there. You know, I would say just from my own experience in Texas, you know, I can burn the Austin sunlight in the span of 15 to 20 minutes. You know, and that obviously carries the risk of, you know, UVA and skin damage associated with it. So someone with much darker skin might not get any benefits until they’re out there for more than an hour, and so that’s kind of the dynamic that you’re in.

So it really depends upon time of day, geographic location, and so forth. And that’s really why, you know, candidly, why we developed the Solius dosing system, because it’s just so hard to control for all of those variables, even if you have a light meter to really do that well. And it seems that you really do need a certain amount to get the efficacy, and it needs to be consistently applied. So you need to do this on a regular basis. You know, in our case, it’s at least once a week. But in addition to that, it really needs to be personalized to you for your specific skin tone.
Linda Sherman
Ray Gordon

Ray Gordon 36:34

Obviously, there’s a pretty high cost to this product, correct? I mean, it’s around three grand.

Chris Kiple 36:40

That’s correct for right now, and we are cognizant of the costs, and we are working every day on R&D to help drive lower-cost solutions in the future.

Ray Gordon 36:48

And there’s a monthly or annual fee for the service.

Chris Kiple 36:51

There is. It’s about $10 a month for the subscription to be able to use the device and, of course, get access to our partners and our benefits.

Ray Gordon 36:59

So that’s for the app that will provide the precision as to how the therapy works and how long the exposure is, and so that sort. So, if you had these installed in a spa of some kind, and you had people come in and use it, there’s no commercial application for this yet, right?

Chris Kiple 37:17

No, there is. We’re actually, you know, actively working in traditional healthcare environments, from cardiologists’ offices, dermatologists’ offices, orthopedic surgeons, you know, primary care physicians. We’re also working in environments like gyms and spas and longevity clinics. So, absolutely, there is a commercial component to this. And you know, as we launch the product and we get more and more market share, you’ll be able to find this, hopefully, in your town and be able to go and access it at a gym or a spa, or you can access it by buying it and bring it into your home for your family.

Ray Gordon 37:49

So the subscription system would be different if you were in a spa or club environment.

Chris Kiple 37:55

Yes, it’ll probably be dictated by the actual subscription or membership that you’re paying to go to that gym or spa or club, or you know, it could be on an à la carte basis as well. Thank you.

Linda Sherman 38:06

So you wouldn’t have your own subscription, like you could go into a gym and use a Peloton and hook into your own subscription. You would be using the gym’s, but how do you get it personalized to yourself?

Chris Kiple 38:20

It’s a great question. Everybody has to have their own account created, and you use your cell phone to do that. And so then you manage your own personal data on your cell phone. And the reason why we do that is because everybody has to go through the skin sensor process so that the Solius device will scan your skin and calculate a dose specific to your skin. And that will carry with you wherever you go, no matter what Solius device you use. Whether using one at your home or you’re traveling and you want to jump into a clinic in Boston, Chicago, New York, wherever it may be, your same dose will travel with you to ensure you have safe and effective treatment wherever you go.

Linda Sherman 38:58

Got it. Okay, I do want to get to Maja, so thank you so much, Chris. That was terrific. Debbie Howard, would you please introduce Maja Mazur?

Debbie Howard 39:12

Yes, thank you so much. And wow, I’m really impressed with everything that you have said, Colin and Chris. Very, very interesting, and I love that we are exploring these important areas of self-care.

So this third area is basically about managing chronic pain using nutrition. And our next speaker is Maja Mazur. She is the co-founder and CEO of Healthnix, which is also a portfolio company of the AgeTech Collaborative from AARP. Healthnix is the first AI operating system for clinical nutrition in chronic pain management.

Maja lives in Austin, Texas, but is a Polish British national. She’s a former product lead at a machine learning startup in London, and she started her career at Goldman Sachs and Norton Rose Fulbright, after which she collaborated with the English Ministry of Justice on their first legal tech incubator, supporting sector-defining projects such as the UK’s legal schema and blockchain arbitration rules, which moved her into the tech arena.
Inspired by her own recovery from chronic hip pain through nutrition, she founded HealthNix to transform the role AI and nutrition play in chronic pain management.

Maja, we’re excited to learn more about HealthNix. Over to you.

Maja Mazur 40:44

Thank you so much, Debbie. It’s great to be here and such a fascinating, very, very interesting discussion. So thank you both to Chris and Colin for kicking us off. Yes, well, lots of parallels. I think we talked quite a lot about chronic inflammation, gut microbiome. You know, how does it all come together to help us feel better and function better? We obviously focus on chronic pain and on nutrition, which is often really overlooked as a modality and as something that can help patients who do live with chronic pain, so very excited to share a little bit more about how does that work and how we really try to make this the standard of care for any chronic pain clinical pathway.

So taking a step back, why did I get into this, and how did it all start? Like you’ve alluded to, Healthnix is actually something that I really wish I had as a patient in my early 20s. Back at the time when I was still at Goldman in London, I developed really debilitating chronic hip pain, and even though I was in that very privileged position with fantastic health insurance. We couldn’t really find a solution. I was trying, like many patients do, physical therapy, injections, medication. Nothing was working. I was literally barely able to walk. Actually, at some of the worst flare-ups at that time, and we did think that surgery was going to be the only path forward for me. Thankfully, that was not true, and I avoided that route. I met someone who specialized in functional nutrition, who really introduced me to this concept of whole-person care through the lens of food as medicine and very personalized food as medicine, very data-driven food as medicine, which really looks at not only your gut microbiome, your blood test results but also the reality within which you operate as an individual. So, what kind of compounding smaller changes can you actually make in your daily dietary pattern that will help you address chronic inflammation, introduce a healthier, more balanced gut microbiome, which will then, taken together, really help soothe your nervous system and balance things out?

For me personally, it was transformational. At the time of that peak recovery, I was already in that product leadership role at the machine learning startup. So professionally, I was exposed to what happens when you have the right models applied to the right data, and I became very interested in how can we, as a company, build something that would make it really easy for the doctors who see chronic pain patients to send those patients to that very credible, data-driven dietary intervention that would really fit around the patient’s lifestyle, so that became a north star. We also realized that it has to fit in within the clinical system. I really do believe that systemic change can come from within. It’s hard, and it takes time, but I think it’s possible. So we have built Healthnix in a way that makes it insurance-covered for the patient, so patients don’t need to pay; they can receive that kind of support covered by most insurance providers.

Now, what is it that we actually do very quickly? We help any clinician who sees the patients with chronic pain to incorporate those very personalized plans into the care plan. We do not want to completely substitute medication that might be needed. We want to provide an augmentation to what already is deemed necessary for that patient. If that leads to fewer medications, that’s great. And obviously, we are really happy with that outcome, but that won’t necessarily always be the case. Sometimes it’s going to be simply fewer side effects, better sleep, and overall improvements to how the patients work.

So within our platform, the dietitians or the clinicians in the future, once we’ve rolled that function out, can design the highly personalized protocol, which is tailored to the patient’s biomarkers, preferences, access to food that they have, lifestyle factors. That protocol is then communicated to the patient through the Healthnix mobile app, so patients actually receive it in a very accessible, easy-to-understand format. They get matched with a dietitian, who is always the expert giving the final approval of the protocol and walking the patient through that protocol as well. And then, where it gets really interesting, patient starts tracking by taking pictures of what they eat and record how they feel.

So we then, in the backend, really correlate the symptoms and the pain flare-up triggers to the dietary intake of each patient, and that’s really where Healthnix becomes very unique and interesting, where we start being able to identify what might be the foods that are triggering you specifically, and therefore make recommendations for each of our patients, which are narrower and therefore easier to follow.

So that’s the principle of the platform, and a little bit about how it came to be, how we think about it in terms of the science and what are the main mechanisms for nutrition really being able to influence chronic pain, which is often a surprise for everyone. We are thinking predominantly about oxidative stress and inflammation, which we talked about quite a lot during the show already. Disturbed glucose metabolism as well, a huge factor in chronic pain severity and also risk factors. Body weight, of course, that does matter, especially musculoskeletal pain, various types of arthritis, and also nutrient status, which is a really interesting thing right now with GLP-1s, because we are actually seeing an increased number of patients who have higher body weight, but who actually malnourished because they are on GLP-1s. They are on their weight loss journey, they are losing weight, but they are not eating enough nutrients, wh ich is problematic for various reasons.

So I’ll pause here. I know we are almost at time, so I want to give the opportunity for people to ask a few questions as well.

Debbie Howard 47:51

Thanks so much, Maja. I really appreciate your great overview of that, and I really recommend that everyone take a look at the websites of our guests today, because these are really wonderful products that are allowing us to benchmark and monitor these conditions so that we can get individualized and customized ways forward for our specific self-care needs. So please do take a look at that. I’d like to see if Chris or Colin or Linda or Ray have any questions for Maja?

Linda Sherman 48:24

Let me just read the websites. So it’s Healthnix, health n i x dot i o and sleep dot a i, and the third one is solius.com, s-o-l-i-u-s.com. I wanted to comment, Maja, that over the years we have had companies working on apps where they were taking photos of the food, and it used to be a super big deal, but AI has made it so much better, hasn’t it?

Maja Mazur 49:06

Yes, it’s still a nascent technology, and to be honest, it is still always a compromise. It depends what you’re already optimizing for, so it’s not yet exactly where I think everyone would like it to be, but it does make that behavior change and tracking significantly easier.

And I think, in general, in addition to the precision angle, so what AI can help us achieve when it comes to identifying dietary triggers and really personalizing whether that’s nutrition plans or any other therapies. Another huge use case and benefit of AI in anything that touches patients’ behavior is just how much more it allows us to do when it comes to patient engagement and making it easier to collect data. Making it more personalized, really allowing us to play with tailoring notifications to the time of the day, patient behavior, identifying flare-ups, reacting differently to when a patient is in a flare-up versus to when everything is great.

So, yes, the image recognition is cool. It’s very useful, but I think it’s also part of a wider AI-driven behavior change. I guess the new approach to behavior change, which we can actually start implementing thanks to AI, that’s the right way to put it.

Linda Sherman 50:36

Can you talk about the challenges with photo recognition of food? You’re saying it’s still not completely there. Is that what you’re saying?

Maja Mazur 50:45

Yes, correct. So, for instance, we still don’t really have models which are really good at very accurate portion size estimation. They are getting better, but when it comes to very precise calorie calculations or for sports performance, for instance, very detailed macros and calculations that really require you to be exact down to the gram. AI models don’t really do that well yet. For us, it’s more recognizing what foods someone is eating. We care less about whether it’s one broccoli or two broccoli, so that’s really why it works for us, but it does get it wrong. And you know, also, when you just take a picture of your plate, you don’t really know what’s underneath a leaf of salad. But that’s not an AI problem.

Linda Sherman 51:39

That’s a good point. On a plate, a lot of things can get buried.

Maja Mazur 51:42

Yes.

Linda Sherman 51:43

Especially at a restaurant where they want to arrange everything to be very pretty.

Maja Mazur 51:47

Yes, or at home, it’s also a way to report your meals without fully reporting them.

Ray Gordon 51:55

So you need a food stylist also as one of the people on your staff.

Maja Mazur 52:01
Yeah.

Ray Gordon 52:02

I have a question. Let’s say I don’t have chronic pain, and I’m a pretty active person, but I’m really concerned with the future possibility of inflammation causing problems or arthritis kicking in. This seems like this system really could work for people who are healthy, don’t particularly have pain, but it’s sort of like a much more comprehensive version of an annual checkup, where you have somebody constantly checking what you’re eating and how your blood work is measuring up. Is that something you can consider?

Maja Mazur 52:32

Yes, it does definitely work when it comes to prevention, scientifically speaking. The reason why we haven’t pursued that is simply because there are so, I think, few people who really engage in prevention. It’s definitely on the rise. I think more people think about it, but it is really hard to sustain behavior and lifestyle change when you’re preventing a future event, as compared to when you’re addressing something that is affecting you every day.

Linda Sherman 53:04

Arthritis is certainly a huge thing in our rethinking aging world. And I wonder if you can just give us a few tips on what to eat and what not to eat for arthritis.

Maja Mazur 53:18

Well, so if I could do that for everyone, Healthnix wouldn’t have to exist. So it will really vary from one person to another. But something that you know we all will benefit from is definitely avoiding the highly inflammatory, highly processed, high-sugar-content foods. But that’s not only for arthritis. That’s, yeah, across the board. These foods are not good for anyone. Other than that, it is really very hard to give, you know, the one magical diet to follow. Even Mediterranean diet, which is often cited as the go-to anti-inflammatory food pattern, can actually be not recommended and even harmful for patients with specific other coexisting conditions or medications that they are on. So there really isn’t a one-size-fits-all answer here.

Linda Sherman 54:17

That’s a great point, Maja. Thank you so much. We’re so delighted to have you as guests today. Thank you so much.

Thank you for joining us today. This is Linda Sherman, founder of the Rethinking Aging Club. We appreciate your supporting the Rethinking Aging Club podcast by subscribing to our channel. See you next time.