Wearables for Women

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1:45Holly Shelton:You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Masser and Tim Stenevek on Bloomberg Radio. It is time now for Business Week's women's health segment. We do focus on key issues in developing technologies impacting the present and future of women's health around the world. It's not always easy when we are seeing images like that and just reminded that there's a lot of stress around the country and really around the world. We welcome Hallie Shelton, Chief Product Officer at Aura Health. She joins us from San Francisco. She was former global product lead for MacBook Pro at Apple. Before that, she served as CEO and co-founder of Move With.

2:20It's a fitness and wellness platform connecting people to guided fitness and meditation classes. It ultimately was sold to Under Armour Connected Fitness. Good to have you on the program. We talk about technology and healthcare converging, and especially with consumer products that increasingly offer things that we used to only be able to get in a clinical or medical environment. How do you view the layering of AI onto this data in order to deliver actionable results to people? Yeah, hi. First, thanks for having me. It's great to be here. When we think about wearables today, this is the first time where we've had these products.

3:01You've got this aura ring that's on you 24-7, continuously measuring you. And so the way that we think about how AI is adding on to this is twofold. One, providing that deep machine learning, the detection, the prediction, the understanding that allows us to translate these signals into something that we can understand and act on every day. And the second is through all the new LLM capabilities that allow us to take and extend that translation into a conversation to help make health a daily practice, something that we incorporate into our everyday as a back and forth conversation. So we're now moving from something that was like a tracker to truly this proactive health companion.

3:41in. Holly, how do you think about the balance? And we think about this a lot. And you are kind of starting to see a pushback, whether it's, you know, dumb phones for kids rather than smartphones, but this balance of having technology that is so much a part of our life, but not having it consume us. And that goes into the wellness and health space as well. So how do you guys think about it at Aura? Yeah, we think about this a lot at Aura. We think a lot about what we internally call quiet technology. And so we really believe that, especially when it comes to wearables, that this should be a product or something that you can put on your body and almost forget about.

4:20It should just be there when you need it and out of your way when you don't. So we have a product that we think a lot about wearability. This is something that you can put on. It's super comfortable. It's incredibly accurate. It has a long battery life. And it's just always there measuring you, giving you insight when you need it, but it's not going to beep at you. It's not going to buzz at you. It's not going to take attention. Instead, we're thinking a lot about how do we connect you back to yourself? And, you know, I will say though, when it comes to technology, I do think about it though, as a plus for women where we've had a lot of conversations in this segment about women's health.

5:01Research has lagged. You often have members of the medical community that are dismissive about various issues for women. And how do you guys think, though, specifically about the opportunities when it comes to women and technology and health and wellness as really maybe a big opportunity? Yeah. Like you said, this is a group of people who have been under-researched, underfunded, often kind of reduced to reproductive health as what we think of as women's health. But at Aura, we're trying to make health a daily practice. We're trying to move the needle on proactive and preventative health. And we do that by giving everybody a voice so that they have the agency to live better.

5:51And for women, we can't do that without deeply understanding their unique physiology at every phase of their reproductive cycle. And so women's health is at the forefront for us. We start almost everything that we work on, starting with women's bodies, deeply understanding that we feel responsibility to do better here. I'm wondering, you know, I have an aura ring. I'm wearing it right now. And one thing that it does tell me, and it knows me to a certain extent, and, you know, if I don't get a good night's sleep, it knows that I'm a parent and have kids. And it says, like, parenting is hard and sort of customizes this message to me.

6:32What does it do differently for a woman if she were to have sort of the same sleep score, the same activity score? Like, what are the differences that happen behind the scenes that present those actionable insights? Yeah, obviously like women, we don't think of our health in silos. And so we've built a collection, a suite of features that start at period onset, that go into contraception and just overall cycle insights that are there with you during pregnancy and into perimenopause. And so as we think about that daily health that you're talking about when you wake up with your sleep score and your readiness score, we understand exactly where you are in your cycle, if you're in your luteal phase or your follicular phase, if you're pregnant.

7:18And so the insight messages that we give to people are all in context of where they are in their cycle. Hey, just got about 25 seconds. Any new rings launching this year? We watch really closely. And if you could just be quick. Can't share that, but we're working on some really exciting things. So stay tuned. Holly, come back when you, we'd love to hear more. Let's stay in touch. Holly Shelton, she is Chief Product Officer over at Aura Health, joining us from San Francisco.

7:49Holly Shelton:The news doesn't stop on the weekends. Context changes constantly. And now Bloomberg is the place to stay on top of it all. Hi, I'm David Gurra. Join us every Saturday and Sunday for the new Bloomberg This Weekend. I'm Christina Ruffini. We'll bring you the latest headlines, in-depth analysis and big interviews. All the stories that hit home on your days off. And I'm Lisa Mateo. Watch and listen to Bloomberg this weekend for thoughtful, enlightening conversations about business, lifestyle, people, and culture. On Saturday mornings, we put the past week's events into context, examining what happened in the markets and the world.

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