Transcript: Wellness and Longevity with Miray Tayfun, Liz Seegert and Jon Warner

This is the transcript for the Rethinking Aging Club Podcast episode recorded August 6, 2026.

Episode Title: Wellness and Longevity with Miray Tayfun, Liz Seegert and Jon Warner

Recorded: August 6, 2026 / Published August 29, 2026

Guests:

Miray Tayfun, CEO and Co-Founder, Vivoo

Liz Seegert, Health Journalist, lizseegert.com; Contributing editor on aging for the Association of Health Care Journalists

Jon Warner, CEO, CareAxis; a US Ambassador for Global Health Connector

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: Wellness and Longevity with Miray Tayfun, Liz Seegert and Jon Warner

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 August 6, 2026. August is National Wellness Month, and we have with us here today three great wellness and longevity experts: Liz Seegert, health journalist; Jon Warner, CEO of CareAxis; Miray Tayfun, who is the co-founder and CEO of Vivoo.

I also have here with me my two co-hosts, Ray Gordon and Debbie Howard. I am going to introduce them, and then Debbie is going to introduce Miray, and then we’ll have Liz and Jon speaking.

So first of all, the introductions for my co-hosts. 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.

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 02:21

And I’d like to introduce Linda. Linda is the founder and executive producer of the News for the Ages podcast and the Rethinking Aging Club podcast, which is a participant in the AgeTech Collaborative from AARP. She is managing editor of Boomer Tech Talk, home to the club’s podcasts. 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 03:07

Thank you very much, Ray Gordon. I do want to remind our speakers that while we have many people who are healthcare professionals, we also have many people in our audience that are just very interested in their health, and so if you use an acronym or buzzword, please make sure to define it for them.
Over to Debbie Howard to introduce Miray. Thank you.

Debbie Howard 03:40

Thank you, Linda. Miray Tayfun is co-founder and CEO of Vivoo. She is a bioengineer, entrepreneur, and health technology innovator whose career has been driven by a passion for making personalized health insights more accessible.

Originally from Turkey, she studied bioengineering at Yildiz Technical University and later expanded her expertise through programs at Stanford University focused on nutrition, genetics, and business strategy.

Before co-founding Vivoo, she worked in biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, and medical diagnostics, and these experiences shaped her vision for empowering people through preventive health technologies.

Today, Miray leads a new generation of consumer health technologies designed to give people practical insights into their health before problems become illnesses, and this reflects her belief that the future of healthcare begins with prevention rather than treatment.
Miray, we’re excited to hear more about Vivoo. Over to you.

Miray Tayfun 04:50

Thank you so much, Debbie. That was a lovely introduction. Thank you.

Hello, everyone. I’m Miray. I’m the co-founder and the CEO of Vivoo. Vivoo is an at-home health and wellness platform that consists of tests that you can do at your home comfort instantly and basically a software that helps you to analyze these tests, and then it gives you actionable insights, as you mentioned, Debbie.

Under our test portfolio, we have many tests, including diagnostics tests such as neuro tract infections, vaginal pH testing, hormone testing for women’s health, also wellness tests that allows you to track your important bios, such as a hydration tracker from your urine, calcium, magnesium, vitamin C, sodium intake calculator, test strips, ketones, protein testing at home, and so on.

All of these tests are rapid tests that either changes colors or lateral flow tests, like your COVID test or pregnancy test that after you use them, it basically appears two lines, so you can understand your results.

What we have made differently compared to other products in the market. First, the at-home testing market is a really small market compared to the lab testing, right? Like you collect your sample at home and send it to a lab and wait for days to weeks to get your result. Rather than that cycle, we provide instant testing at home.

And the second most important part of our business is our software that allows you to analyze these tests with image processing, visual recognition via your mobile phone camera so you can instantly digitalize your data for basically to be able to share with your healthcare providers later or to be able to go back to your history and see your patterns. And all of this data combined with your variables, like your Apple Health, Oura Ring, that also sends data into Vivoo platform.

All of this data combined gives you personalized recommendations and insights, and also information and education, so you can make better decisions about your body.

Debbie Howard 07:02

Thank you so much, Miray. That was a great overview. I would like to see if any of our other people on the stage have questions for you.

Liz Seegert 07:11

I would just like to ask Miray about privacy and how the data is protected.

Miray Tayfun 07:20

That is such a beautiful question, Liz, because there are so many companies struggle with this in the past. Obviously, it’s one of the top priorities for us. We are HIPAA compliant, and at the moment, we are getting various certifications, actually, because our infrastructure allows it, such as cybersecurity, etc., ISO certifications for European Union. We have customers in over 120 countries. So obviously every region has their own requirements, but fundamentally it is our responsibility to secure our customers’ sensitive data and make sure that there are no vulnerabilities in our systems internally or defensed really well, basically from external attacks. Yeah.

Linda Sherman 08:05

Thank you. This is Linda. You mentioned integration with Apple Health. Can you talk about how that works?

Miray Tayfun 08:14

Of course. You can connect various data points into Vivoo. Inside the Vivoo application, you’ll be able to connect other platforms. You can connect Apple Health, Google Health, Oral Booth, Garmin-like products, your smart scales. This allows us to show our customers different patterns.

A simple example is when I haven’t slept well, and I’m dehydrated. Then, for example, I log the symptoms such as I have period cramps. Like it allows you to see all these complex things that a human mind probably wouldn’t realize, but our software is able to detect. Or your magnesium intake is low, and you had some low performance in your exercise, etc.

So it is basically just an additional data point that allows us to show our customers how these nutrients or their health data affects their day-to-day life.

Linda Sherman 09:10

We recently had on Colin Lawlor, the founder and CEO of Sleep.ai, and they provide integration data because sleep is so important. Do you have anything on specifically sleep, like the Oura Ring or Sleep.ai?

Miray Tayfun 09:30

Yeah, we have detailed data analytics based on different sleep patterns and how nutrition affects it directly. That’s what I can share. For example, dehydration, low vitamin C intake affects sleep scores significantly. Magnesium same. Other than that, sleep is another biomarker for us, just like our vaginal pH data point. It allows us to show the bigger picture to our customers.

Linda Sherman 09:58

Thank you. Anybody else?

Ray Gordon 10:00

You also have a product for making your toilet a lot smarter, and I’m just wondering if you give us a brief idea of how that works.

Miray Tayfun 10:08

Oh, thank you so much for asking. That is a product we are so proud of because it wasn’t easy to build it. This is the version four. It started as a whole toilet bowl, then it became a toilet seat. Now it’s a plug-and-play device that you can attach to your toilet.

The technology behind it is an optical sensor that allows your urine to flow through the device, and it basically measures your urine density to give you information about your hydration. Once you flush, the device cleans itself. The beauty of that product is that it allows you to continuously track hydration and pH markers and sends the data to your mobile phone.

Especially in geriatric care, like elder care, it is a game changer, I think, because hydration is so important, but it is one of the tips that is the easiest to miss because tracking how much water someone drinks is always a struggle, especially if you care your elder parents. It happened with my grandmother. Like we were trying to convince her to drink water, etc., and we were using manual Vivoo tests to see if she was hydrated enough. With these type of products, like athletes, elder people, people with chronic diseases, people who use heavy medication will be able to continuously track their hydration from their urine density.

Obviously, clinical hydration looks just more than your urine, but it is a great point and it’s a great standard when it comes to understanding the fluid and electrolyte balance in the body. The device is just going to market. We priced it so all Vivoo products are affordable for a reason. We have built products in the past that we never went to market because we don’t want to sell a $200 device and $50 a test system to customers because we know the customers don’t have that budget, healthcare is already expensive. So we priced this as an introduction price, $99. We worked really hard.

Yes, it tracks just two biomarkers, and it continuously does that. It allows you to take over 10,000 measurements with just one battery, and after you change the battery, you can keep using the device. But it was really important for us to make it affordable, and that was the hardest part, Ray of the R&D. Like, how can we make this sensor small and effective enough, but also customers can afford it and just plug it to their toilet and start using it?

Hopefully, it will also go to retail, just like our other products. We are available in Walmart. Smart Toilet is a new product, though; I have to say that. It still needs a couple of years until it comes to its perfect shape. But if you want to try it, please reach out, or you can be one of our first customers.

Ray Gordon 12:53

And what is the range? It has to connect, I guess, through Bluetooth.

Miray Tayfun 12:57

Correct.

Ray Gordon 12:57

So, do you need your phone in the house or in the room, or how does it transfer the data?

Miray Tayfun 13:02

Correct. Unfortunately, most of our products requires your phone in the bathroom to scan the tests, etc., which is not a like a great thing to use your phone in the bathroom. I agree with that, but everybody goes to a bathroom with their phones nowadays, so it’s not a big deal. Basically, it works with proximity. Multiple people in a household can connect to the same device. Like five, six people can use the same device, but whoever is the closest will get the data results into their phone via Bluetooth. The range is pretty good; it’s like around 20 meters. But again, people go to bathroom with their phone, so it’s not a big challenge for us here.

Ray Gordon 13:40

So, you sort of check in with your device and say, “Hi, I’m the one using the toilet right now.”

Miray Tayfun 13:45

We have a check-in button on the app at the moment in the first product, but in time, we are trying to make it automatically start and measure automatically, and you can either accept the data or not to your phone.

Ray Gordon 14:01

And one more question about hydration. It’s very important for people. How does this tell you how far away you are from being in the proper range, or does it say that you know you should hydrate soon or you’re okay for the next few hours? How does it work with as far as monitoring?

Miray Tayfun 14:19

So it measures urine specific gravity, so density of your urine. Hydration is not only dependent on how much water you take, per se, but also electrolytes also affects your hydration level. And yes, it gives you a range based on the clinical benchmarks, but the app’s recommendation will be always the same based on your age, weight, height. You have to drink two to three liters of water, like eight glasses of water a day. It just highlights if you haven’t until that point.

And hydration score, the reason we wanted to create a continuous tracker. It really changes a lot. Like, once when you wake up, your first urine might be really dense, and after a cup of drinks, water, coffee, etc., it might change. So continuously tracking it allows you to basically remembering to hydrate yourself easier.

For me, I’ve been using Vivoo’s rapid tests for years, so it’s almost like a new skill for me. In my mind, I know now if I’m hydrated or not. Once you get the data for so long, it’s easier. But we have many customers, which is always really nice to hear, who are struggling to drink water, who hates water. It’s interesting, like who are constantly dehydrated because of their heavy exercise, and Vivoo helps them to identify, and they immediately take an action.

It is the easiest thing to, I think, fix when it comes to body. Same with like vitamin C. Like these nutrients, water-soluble nutrients, changes a lot in terms of the state in our body. Just to keep an eye on the data allows us to always be on top of it.

Ray Gordon 16:01

And does it chart the information or just give you a list of data points over time?

Miray Tayfun 16:08

So it shows you the spot result, also your historical data, also the patterns. If you’re using a significant amount of time, basically correlations between different activities and biomarkers. It’s a pretty sophisticated software. Again, the data point itself is not that meaningful. Your spot urine hydration level might not mean a lot, but once you use it for a continuous period of time, you start to see, like after my run, it changes before my meetings. I have to hydrate better. I perform better, etc.

Ray Gordon 16:45

Thank you.

Linda Sherman 16:47

I’m hoping that it would give me reminders to take electrolytes because I drink tons of water, but I’m not great at making sure that I get electrolytes.

Miray Tayfun 16:58

That’s a good point. I have low blood pressure, and I always had a dizzy head, Linda. And to see actually my electrolyte levels with products like Vivoo allowed me to now replace water with electrolyte water, sort of like natural mineral water, and my dizziness stopped. Like something so simple, I used to get up, and I feel like lightheaded; that changed by understanding. Oh, okay, my electrolyte levels are low because I’m sweating a lot and I’m not replacing it.

Again, information is so empowering. Even the smallest thing have a huge impact in your life. If you have tools like it’s not just Vivoo. I believe, like all these variable devices, etc. Once you use them a period of time, you don’t have to use them every day, all day, forever. Like get obsessed with the data, but once you use them, even about CGMs, like once you use them for a period of time, you see a lot about your habits and how it is affecting your day-to-day life.

Linda Sherman 17:58

Can you print out from the app so that, as Ray was mentioning, that the patterns, the charts, things like that, so that you can show your doctor all of that?

Miray Tayfun 18:09

If you want, you can export data. Yes, we also have, for example, women’s health. Like whenever I go to my gynecologist, I take my Vivoo Women’s Health data. I show her my periods, my LH search, my FSH level, follicle stimulating hormone level. We have some customers who are using it for perimenopause, menopause. They take that data to their doctors, healthcare professionals.

Again, not every doctor cares that data, but there are so many great doctors who are asking, like, “Hey, are you active? Are you eating well? Are you drinking water?” Like, these are important details in any type of treatment, but most importantly in well-being, right? Yeah.

Linda Sherman 18:53

On the controversy about drinking water versus drinking coffee and other things for people who don’t love the taste of water? How do you feel about coffee and tea for hydration?

Miray Tayfun 19:07

Coffee and tea dehydrates you, so if you’re drinking coffee consciously, you should be balancing it out. That’s the case, especially since I moved to United States. That’s what I’ve been observing. People prefer soft drinks over water, beer, coffee, etc., over water, and they feel like they’re hydrating themselves, but actually they’re dehydrating themselves. So yeah, that’s how I feel about it. I drink coffee too. It’s just you have to balance it.

Linda Sherman 19:36

Thank you very much. I’ll let somebody else get a word in edgewise here.

Debbie Howard 19:40

Do we have any other questions from Liz or Jon.

Jon Warner 19:44

Miray, I guess you’ve got a lot of data you’ve collected in all those countries you mentioned. I’m interested in what trends and patterns that you’ve seen in that data in terms of not only where greatest need is today, you know, greatest usage of the tests that you’ve already got, but in terms of your future pipeline. And then maybe some demographic differences you might have observed where you collect the data between men and women or people of different ages, for example. I’d just love to hear.

Miray Tayfun 20:11

That is a wonderful question, John. We would need like hours and hours, days to discuss the data, and still I believe there’s so many untapped areas. Even though, like, Vivoo is a scaled company, we still have limited resources, and that is an area I’m always trying to invest more because how else Vivoo bring new information into daylight, right? No other company probably in the world has our unique set of data when it comes to urine biomarkers, hormone data, cycle information, and variable information, we have seen differences in states, countries.

When it comes to hydration, I have to check the latest data. But for example, in the United States, I saw that Hawaii was the most hydrated state, and I was like, “Hmm, interesting. Why?” Like, and when you look at the policy of the local government, there are no plastic bottles allowed, but there are water fountains everywhere, and everybody has their own water bottles, right? Like, for example, in Japan, they have identified that high blood pressure-related deaths were higher in a region, and their sodium intake were significantly higher than the other prefectures in Japan. We are also seeing, like in some of the countries, we are seeing how Ramadan affects hydration levels, right? Like, our customers.

So many beautiful insights are coming out from our data. As a company, as a philosophy, we never sell data. We only use data to either bring new information into daylight or to bring better insights to our customers, because customers trust us with their data. And I think utilizing this valuable gem, in my opinion, by selling it to a pharmaceutical is an evil pathway, but what we are working on right now to give more information is that how variable data and some micronutrients data is correlating with women’s health hormone data, if that makes sense.

This is something that I’m obsessed right now with because women’s health is so understudied, just today, for example, I was sharing like it’s a personal thing, but my period is getting shorter and shorter, right? Like it used to be 28 days, now it’s 24 days, and in between it cuts shorter and shorter. And I’m sure there are so many herbal remedies, or if there was research, medicine could be developed to keep my cycle longer, so I would ovulate later, and I would have more eggs. Right? It will increase the longevity of my childbearing ages. But unfortunately, it is such an understudied area. Accessing information is so limited.

So what we’re trying to do with Vivoo, we are trying to turn the data we have into not just new information but also hopefully services and insights that customers can see about themselves, patterns that they can recognize about themselves.

Jon Warner 23:15

Thank you.

Debbie Howard 23:16

Thank you so much, Miray. And if no one else has any other questions, I’d like to just ask my last question, Miray. I want to just say that I am a huge fan of trying to move individuals and our whole system from treatment to prevention, and to have such a tool to do individualized benchmarking and monitoring is a critical part of helping us all to move in that direction. So, thank you for everything you’re doing at Vivoo to help us make that easier.

And then I just wanted to ask you, when you look at all this great data that you’ve got worldwide, I know there’s so many different ways you can look at it, and women’s health is certainly critical and very important to me personally. I think it’s also really interesting to think about how the data breaks out for men and also for older adults, wherever that could be done.

And also, it dawned on me that Vivoo and these kinds of tools could really be a help in this problem we have in healthcare deserts and rural areas where we don’t have enough doctors and medical professionals, so people have to be more proactive. So I wondered if you could just say a few words about that at the end, and then we’ll move on.

Miray Tayfun 24:36

What we’re seeing is for the United States. What I can say is, women in general are more on top of their biomarkers such as vitamin C, hydration, sodium intake. There are slight differences, like 4-5% in general, but women are in general better. And interestingly, our elder customers’ data in some biomarkers such as nutrient intake, such as sodium, etc., is better than younger generations. But we are also seeing, like for example, calcium intake. It is such an important thing that should be discussed more, I think, for women.

I think every woman should tell them each other, like, “Hey, don’t forget to get enough calcium every day,” because, especially if they had a child, you know, babies suck the calcium from our bones so they can grow. And as a result of that, after the age of 65, one in two women faces osteoporosis-related fractions in their bones. And we are seeing in the data also, like yes, elder women are not getting enough calcium in their diets.

When it comes to food deserts, yes, at the beginning of Vivoo, I was really excited to bring Vivoo-like technologies to food deserts because I’ve been in places in the states that yeah, there were nothing but a Subway, Wendy’s, McDonald’s, and nothing else. Nothing else, literally. A small grocery store doesn’t have fresh fruits. I’ve been in food deserts, and it’s a big struggle. And having the data of your nutrient intake is so valuable. Yet alone there might not be clinical care because there is no hospital, no nothing. Having a urinary tract infection test, vaginal pH test, being able to check your hormones can be life-changing.

But as we grow now, I’m also seeing some regions, like Syria, for example, like Afghanistan. Like I don’t know why, but like some of these countries don’t allow women to go get any treatment because they have to be checked by women doctors, and women cannot be doctors legally. So, also, like these areas, I don’t want to say excites me. Like I just want to do something about it. If that makes sense, how can we bring people who has no tools the tools they need to be able to check their health when it comes to simple diagnosis as urinary tract infections. So it’s a global problem in America. Food deserts in America, low-income areas globally, people who has no access to healthcare. These are really important topics. Obviously, we have limited power again, but we are trying to collaborate as much as we can with NGOs, so we can bring our tests to these people.

Debbie Howard 27:26

Okay, thanks. I hadn’t even thought of some of those use cases you mentioned, so it’s super interesting to think about the problem and how Vivoo can help. So I do recommend that everyone take a look at vivoo.io. That is the website for Vivoo, because it’s a little bit complicated subject. You know, I may not need to monitor some of the things that you need to monitor.

So there are lots of different combinations of ways you can monitor at the website, and I recommend you take a look at that and see if there might be a way that Vivoo can help you. So, Linda, with that, I think we—if there are no more questions—we’ll move on.

Linda Sherman 28:07

Except I do have one more. I do want to thank you for pointing out those global issues. I mean, when you said there’s countries where you have to see a female doctor, but the females aren’t allowed to be doctors. It was like boom, you know. Goodness gracious, this product is very, very important. So, thank you so much for that, Miray. I’m looking at vivoo.io Vivoo site and the new smart toilet. You said it only tracks two things. What are the two things that it tracks?

Miray Tayfun 28:49

At the moment, hydration. Hopefully, later in the year, pH level as well.

Linda Sherman 28:54

Got it. Okay, and then the price hopefully will still be the same when you have more things.

Miray Tayfun 29:00

Been trying to keep it that way. It’s challenging, but yeah.

Linda Sherman 29:04

Okay, great. Okay, thank you so much. I am now going to introduce Liz Seegert, who I had the great pleasure of meeting in person in 2018 at an On Aging conference. She is awesome. She writes all these wonderful articles, and we are familiar with her work. And so thrilled to have her on our show.

Liz Seegert is an award-winning independent journalist who has written about health for more than 30 years. Her main beats include aging, women’s health, social determinants of health, and health policy. She’s the contributing editor on aging for the Association of Healthcare Journalists, helping reporters better understand healthcare’s many nuances.

Her articles have appeared in dozens of national and local media outlets, including Scientific American, Fortune, The Wirecutter, Time, Kiplinger, The American Journal of Nursing, PBS Next Avenue, and WebMD’s Medscape. Liz also co-directs two fellowships, mentoring and training emerging journalists in aging and in health reporting.
Liz Seegert, please. Thank you.

Liz Seegert 30:34

Thank you very much, Linda. Hi, everyone, and thank you all for having me. Since the theme this month is wellness, I thought I might want to start with a paradox, because especially when it comes to older women, we can’t talk about personal wellness until we also acknowledge how broken our healthcare system is.

We are living in an era of fragmented care. Your cardiologist doesn’t talk to your gynecologist. Your primary care doctor may have no training in menopause, and if you’re one of the 63 million adults caring for an aging parent, on top of managing your own health, the fragmentation doubles. You become the coordinator, the translator, the scheduler, the care manager. As Linda mentioned, I write about these issues for dozens of consumer and professional publications.

And when it comes to caregiving, that squeeze is real, and it falls hardest on women. The latest caregiving in the U.S. report from AARP and the National Alliance for Caregiving found that 63 million Americans, nearly one in four adults, are now family caregivers. That’s a 45 percent jump since 2015, so just about 10 or 11 years. And of those, 61 percent are women. That’s almost two-thirds. The unpaid care work is valued at over $1 trillion annually. That’s more than the revenue of either Amazon or Walmart. So just think about how much free labor that is. And it’s devastating, especially to women’s health, careers, and retirement security.

So when we talk about wellness, we have to understand that wellness is not just yoga and green smoothies and herbal tea. It’s whether you can get your doctor to take your symptoms seriously, whether you can coordinate care across multiple specialists without losing your mind, whether you have time to schedule your own mammogram while you’re also scheduling your mother’s cardiology follow-up.

And one of the things we touched on earlier, Miray mentioned. I want to talk about menopause because this is where a lot of misinformation and lack of really good evidence-based information collide. So I’m just going to focus on the U.S. Every year, about 1.3 million women hit menopause, but according to AARP, only about 5% of women were getting treated for symptoms as of 2021. I suspect the numbers higher now. And it’s not because women think they can tough it out. It’s because our whole system isn’t prepared, and it’s a third of women’s lives. But many providers don’t have the knowledge to treat menopausal, perimenopausal, and postmenopausal women, according to the Menopause Society, there’s only about 1300 certified practitioners, and the information that women do get is often distorted.

For example, hormone replacement therapy was overprescribed decades ago as a fountain of Youth. Then the Women’s Health Initiative results came out, and women who could have benefited didn’t seek treatment because everybody was afraid. I fell into that cohort. Now HRT prescriptions have surged 72% since 2021. But as the FDA said last year, the evidence that supports starting systemic HRT should be done within 10 years of menopause onset or before age 60 to get the most out of the heart and bone benefits. Many women don’t know this, and many women don’t know it’s not a panacea for everything.

But in the past few years, I’ve seen it. I think we’ve all seen it. Menopause has become incredibly commercialized. It’s led to a gold rush of expensive products and memberships that go way beyond what the evidence supports, and women are being marketed solutions that may not fit their needs. And when you look at racial disparities, it’s even worse.

Black women are about three times more likely than white women to experience premature menopause, and research from the study of women’s health across the nation, known as the Swan Study, and the Journal of the American Medical Association show that women of color reach menopause earlier, experience more severe symptoms, and face higher rates of cardiovascular disease afterward. But four in 10 Black women surveyed by the Black Women’s Health Imperative reported discrimination while seeking care, and over half were unsure which recommendations to follow.

And then there’s ageism itself when we talk about older women. Ageism in healthcare costs an estimated 63 billion annually in additional treatment for conditions like heart disease and diabetes, according to researchers at Yale. It shows up when the doctor says that’s normal for your age and dismisses a real symptom, or when they speak to your adult child instead of you, or when they use patronizing language. Over 20% of adults over age 50 report discrimination when seeking health care. So that not only affects your dignity, but it affects your overall health and wellness.

So you know what I would tell, especially women, is it’s not enough to just be a squeaky wheel. You have to be an informed squeaky wheel. You need to advocate, but also advocate based on knowledge and facts, not on myths and stereotypes or marketing.

Review that information—the kind of information that Vivoo might provide—with clinicians that understand menopause, that understand aging care, and that understand specific health trajectories of older women. Ask whether your provider has menopause training. Bring a written list of symptoms and medication. Ask about care coordination. And if your doctor won’t look at you or is talking to their computer instead of face-to-face, find somebody else.

Because wellness, at its core, starts with accurate information, not hype from a supplement commercial, or not fear from a 20-year-old study, or not the latest trend on TikTok, but you need to get real, evidence-based knowledge about what your body’s going through, what treatments are appropriate, and how to navigate a health system that too often ignores middle-aged and older women.

Debbie Howard 37:47

Oh my goodness, Liz! I’ve been living whatever you talked about the whole thing. I’m 72. I had real problems when I went through menopause because I was in Japan and I couldn’t get proper attention. And by the time I got back to the States, it was too late.

I’ve also been a caregiver, and thank you so much for the nod to the severe impact of caregiving that is laid upon women largely, but many, many more times these days, men as well, all age groups, and I am really concerned that we’re creating new waves of generations who are compromised with their physical health, their mental health, and their financial health. So, thank you for that.

Yeah, I’m also really impressed by your whole premise that wellness starts with accurate information, because we all need to be really proactive and fierce about how we gather that information and data for ourselves. So I’d love to see if anyone else has any questions or comments.

Linda Sherman 38:56

Especially from Jon. Jon.

Jon Warner 38:58

Yeah. Well, thank you. Yeah, that was fantastic, Liz, and I’m going to pick up some of the themes just in terms of what I will follow on with.

I’m interested in older adults. Older adults, I think, have got the biggest challenges here. In fact, even finding a doctor that takes Medicare these days is quite a challenge. How do we navigate that problem in terms of people who are interested in their own wellness but can’t find a doctor who supports them?

Liz Seegert 39:22

It’s a real challenge, Jon. I live in the Hudson Valley in New York, and I’m about maybe 70 miles north of Manhattan. We moved up here from the city during the pandemic, as many people did. And to find a doctor that accepted my husband’s Medicare took us probably eight or 10 phone calls, and he has traditional Medicare, so there aren’t even networks that we had to go into. But finding doctors that want to take on the aging population because they do have multiple health problems, more often than not, I’m generalizing here, is very challenging. There’s diabetes. There’s high blood pressure. There’s heart disease. There’s osteoporosis. I mean, there’s so many things, and quite frankly, our system in the U.S. is pretty broken.

That some people can afford good care; some people can’t. Where I live, it’s very car-dependent. So if you have the transportation, you can go find a specialist in another city if you have to. If you’re reliant on the bus, or worse, you know, an access ride-type service or a taxi, you’re pretty much stuck with whatever’s around you, and we know that there’s a lot of unequal care being given, whether it’s the poorer urban areas or in rural parts of the U.S.

I can’t speak so much to other countries, but other countries don’t have our healthcare system. We still look at healthcare, unfortunately, in many ways as a privilege and not a right. And it’s very sad because, particularly for older adults, they’re inundated with drugs. They’re inundated with confusing information. One specialist will say one thing, and another will tell them something else, and then they all of a sudden wind up on 12 different medications that can often do more harm than good.

So I don’t know what the answer is right now because I don’t think we’re going to get anywhere in the next few years, but hopefully we can take a page from the UK or Canada or one of the other European countries and do something a little bit better by our elders.

Linda Sherman 41:49

Okay, thank you so much, Liz, and I’m sure that Miray and Jon were very happy to be able to meet you here, as well as our audience. Thank you. We want to go on to Jon Warner. Debbie, can you please introduce Jon? Thank you.

Debbie Howard 42:10

Yes, thank you so much. Jon Warner is a healthcare innovation strategist and entrepreneur who now serves as CEO of CareAxis. His work focuses on how artificial intelligence, predictive analytics, and care coordination are reshaping the future of health and wellness. Jon also represents the U.S. geographic area as an ambassador for Global Health Connector, a U.K.-based nonprofit that fosters learning and collaboration to accelerate global improvements in health, well-being, and longevity.

Throughout his career, Jon has collaborated with healthcare organizations, technology companies, startups, and investors to advance more proactive, personalized approaches to care. He is passionate about helping people maintain their health, independence, and quality of life through earlier insights, smarter technology, and better coordinated care.

Jon, we’re interested in hearing your perspectives. Thank you.

Jon Warner 43:14

Well, thank you very much, Debbie, for the introduction. As for the other two, that’s a very useful beginning. I’d like to add a couple of things just in terms of my experience. I’ve been in healthcare broadly now for 35 years, and then the last 15 of that very much looking at older adults as a vulnerable population. And I think Miray and Liz both had really insightful things to say about the population and how it ages. Healthy aging is something we should all be concerned about, and I guess it starts in the womb. And it’s pretty important that a six-year-old can age healthily to seven years of age, as much as it is for an 82-year-old to get to 83 or 93.

So I tend to take that perspective, and I think that’s all about getting to whatever you want to call it: good longevity, better lifespan, better health span, and all those words we use these days. Ultimately, for me, that comes down to how do we help people thrive in all circumstances.

I recently put a post up on LinkedIn, which I called the longevity gap, which was the subset, which was why living longer has created a new caregiving crisis. And by that I didn’t mean just that we don’t have enough caregivers, which we’ve already discussed even in this conversation. I meant that we don’t know how to sail into the gap we’ve created, and let me just explain that a little bit.

So, very recently, a couple of months ago, James Walpole in the National Academy of Sciences said we’ve actually increased human life expectancy by approximately two and a half years every decade since 1840. I mean, that’s just an incredible number. It’s persisted across generations despite wars and pandemics and all sorts of things. So you know, today what might have been an average age of 40 or 50 back in the early 1800s, we know now, is people living well into their 80s and 90s, and a lot of that’s the marvel of medicine. Initially, that would have been getting the death rate at birth, you know, down as much as we have, but it’s increasingly gone to deal with chronic conditions.

But what we haven’t done much about in that same period is how do we sail into the gap that we’ve now created, if we’ve got a gap between, say, 45 and 85, that’s 40 more years we were living back at the beginning of that particular period I just mentioned, and because it’s two and a half years every decade, it’s actually a huge gap that’s getting ever wider in a population that’s growing. And at the top end of that scale, again, as we’ve talked about, there are an endless array of problems that we have to suddenly address in terms of what’s going on and you know how we actually think about ways of selling to the gap. There’s not enough time, much as Miray said earlier, to go and deal with all of the different issues. And I think everything we need to talk about should be data-driven, by the way.

But let me just raise a few that I think are really interesting, just in terms of things that I’m thinking about and working on, and I’ll come lastly to what I’m doing at CareAxis. I think the first one is I think we need to better understand the risk of not thriving, of declining, both as individuals and then in the system that supports us. So in, you know, doctors, nurses, and everyone else in the support system in the caregiver community, I don’t think we understand that, and in fact, we’ve already covered it. Might be the risk of low hydration. I listened to the podcast last month. We were talking about declining dental health, for example, which, early on, kids are going to say, “I don’t need to clean my teeth. It doesn’t matter.” Well, it sure matters by the time you’re up in your 70s or your 80s. So we need to understand that better, or what the risk is of not actually putting the work in to be the captain of our own health ship, as it were.

So I think that’s a huge area where we need to get our act together in terms of understanding how we maintain independence, purpose, mobility, and quality of life, and not have particularly health issues nip at our heels, but also other issues that can get us into decline. It may not even be with us. It may be you’re dealing with grief or you’re dealing with isolation. You know issues that you know are indirect impacts on our health, but nonetheless they are very impactful in terms of what they go on, what they affect.

The other issue that was in the headline in terms of my work is: can we use technology in general to help us? And we certainly have on the medicine side of the fence. We live in exciting times. We’ve got software around these days galore, and in the last three or four years, we’ve had AI really go and make its mark in the world in terms of what it’s capable of doing. And I think the promise is even greater, and I think it’s going to go and give us a whole new revelation in terms of personal health. And I think that’s wonderful because if we want to be captain of our own health ship, or our home wellness ship, or our own thriving ship, we need that data, and I think AI can serve that up.

But of course, we need to make sure it’s credible, it’s well grounded, it’s giving us the right advice. So I think it’s not so much the technology; it’s how it’s deployed and applied, and we need to give that a lot more thought than we are. For example, it gets very exciting talking about digital health twins, for example, where you can use software to go and model how things are going to turn out, and then maybe correct behavior earlier on in terms of making sure a different outcome, better one comes about, sometimes they call this a second brain, which AI is capable of creating these days to sort of think differently. But again, you need credibility in terms of what it’s telling you. You certainly don’t want to hallucinate it in that kind of environment.

Lastly, I’ll just mention care coordination because it’s come up so many times. I think the one issue that perhaps in my mind is the greatest in terms of declining or not thriving is what we’ve already alluded to with everyone today, which is the care gaps. And I know on this podcast you talk about it all the time from various vantage points. Care gaps occur for all of us all of the time. They happen to us personally. They happen for our kids. They happen for our parents, they happen for our loved ones, and we see it every day. We need better ways of getting people to navigate those care gaps well.

I think software can help. I think AI empowered softwares can help with all of that, but our healthcare system in the US is incredibly fragmented. So, for example, we at CareAxis are building care coordination in some of the particular gaps that are in the market. One I’ll leave you with, and I’ll come to a pause, is we have 4.1 million people aged 63 or older in affordable housing in the U.S. That is an enormous group of people for which we know very little. We know they tend to be older. Those 4.1 people, on average, are 79 years of age. They’ve got three to four chronic conditions. They see care gaps every single day because, generally speaking, they don’t have primary care doctors, and generally speaking, they use the emergency room as their prime way of getting treatment for something minor, might be an ear infection and something major. They’ve just fallen, or they’ve had a UTI, or whatever it might be.

So I think this is how we have to be smart. We have to think contextually about what we’re trying to do. Use the data that’s available to us in order to do some of the smart things that people like Miray, for example, is doing in terms of Vivoo. So let me draw a pause at that point. But that’s my quick take on how at least we go after longevity in a joined-up way.

Debbie Howard 50:23

Thank you for the great overarching comments there that pulled everything together really nicely. And you know, I think these are really complex and multi-layered type discussions because that’s what we’re talking about. We’re talking about things that involve a lot of different aspects. If we were going to attempt to fix it, let’s just say that. But I think we’ve touched on a lot of really interesting things today, and I appreciate your great wrap-up there, Jon. Linda.

Linda Sherman 50:53

I do want to allow Jon to give us a sentence or two about what CareAxis is about in its current form, focusing on affordable housing, because the housing crisis is something that we talk about on the show a lot, and it does have to do with wellness and longevity. Could you touch on care access, please, Jon?

Jon Warner 51:16

Sure, I can, and I’ll keep it brief. I think we all know, and this is not a phrase I invented that, you know, very often housing is health and health is housing. In Maslow’s Triangle, it’s right at the bottom. Right? We want to have shelter, a roof over our head, so that we can, you know, thrive on that solid platform. We’ve got too many people living homeless on the streets to start off with, but then living in accommodations that perhaps are suboptimal in all sorts of ways. They need perhaps more care to be rendered than anyone else, and again, that starts with data.

So, what CareAxis does is actually pulls together through case assessment and then case management of every resident that lives in affordable housing, and it’s not just older adults; it’s everybody. So, as soon as you house them, you actually start understanding the individual at a very human level and case assessing that individual. You know who are they at a personality level? How do they roll? You know what are they like and not like? What’s their circle of friends? What is their support system if it exists at all, etc.? Recording that non-episodically so that we can really understand how to best help them thrive in their journey forward from whatever starting point they’re at. That’s the whole basis.

And eventually, I see CareAxis as going across the whole of the so-called post-acute system or senior living system, put more simply, because I think we’ve got many gaps. And for me, senior living is often the Achilles’ heel of healthcare in the U.S.

Liz Seegert 52:40

Excellent.

Ray Gordon 52:41

Hi, Jon. I have a question on that. This system is for the communities that support these people to implement, right? I mean, this is not for an individual. So, how do you convince the industry to accept this widely?

Jon Warner 52:58

Well, and that’s a long question. The short answer to that is a lot of affordable housing is government-funded under HUD, and HUD does pay for service and care coordination. Now it pays for it under certain rules, but it does expect, and for example, under HUD standards for success, it does expect an individual and will subsidize at least, and in some cases fully pay for that individual to do the work. So in so doing, we can actually build bridges to thriving and longevity.

Because if you’re talking to someone already, and that’s paid for to do so, those housing operators and owners, and even municipalities who own all of this, will very much take this on board, and they can then render better care to those residents and create good outcomes for them. You know, it means that they got more stability in the resident population, much greater staff satisfaction in what they’re doing, less evictions, all of those sorts of things. So it’s a win-win if this is done well.

Ray Gordon 53:51

Thank you.

Linda Sherman 53:52

All right. So thank you so much to everyone for being here. This was a wonderful honoring of the month of August, National Wellness Month, and we really appreciate all of you. Thank you so much for being here.

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.