Health and wearables product leader DeCarlos Love leaves Google to serve as
CEO
The Alice L. Walton Foundation to be a strategic investor to
leverage AI to make a healthier life accessible to all
SAN FRANCISCO, July 8, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- The OpenAI Startup
Fund and Thrive Global announced today the creation of a new
company, Thrive AI Health, exclusively devoted to building an AI
health coach. The company's mission is to use AI to democratize
access to expert-level health coaching to improve health outcomes.
This will also address growing health inequities by bringing the
power of behavior change to the urgent challenge of chronic
diseases.
The company will be funded by the OpenAI Startup Fund and Thrive
Global as lead investors. The Alice L. Walton Foundation is a
strategic investor in the new company, underscoring Thrive AI
Health's focus on health equity.
As Sam Altman and Arianna Huffington wrote in an op-ed in TIME,
"So much of the conversation around AI has been about how much time
it will save us and how productive it will make us. But AI could go
well beyond efficiency and optimization to something much more
fundamental: improving both our health spans and our lifespans.
Because health is also what happens between doctor visits. In the
same way the New Deal built out physical infrastructure to
transform the country, AI will serve as part of the critical
infrastructure of a much more effective health care system that
supports everyday people's health in an ongoing way. These are some
of the ideas behind Thrive AI Health."
DeCarlos Love, a product leader
who was most recently at Google, will be CEO of the new company. At
Google, he led sensors, AI & ML algorithms as well as health
and fitness experiences across all devices and platforms, including
Fitbit by Google Fitness, Pixel Watch and Wear OS. Prior to Google,
Love held product roles at Apple and Athos. His passion and
experience are further cemented from spending time as a coach for
different sports as well as developing a childhood obesity program
in his hometown of Minneapolis.
Thrive AI Health will use the power of generative AI to
hyper-personalize and scale behavior change across the five key and
interconnected daily behaviors that govern our health: sleep, food,
fitness, stress management and connection. Given that behavior
accounts for a significant share of health outcomes than medical
care or our genes, by adopting healthier habits in these five
behaviors, people can make dramatic improvements in health
outcomes.
The Thrive AI Health Coach will be an essential tool for both
prevention and for optimizing the treatment of disease through an
AI personal context engine that understands the user and generates
personalized AI-driven insights; proactive, multimodal,
expert-level coaching as well as nudges and recommendations unique
to each user across the five behaviors. They will all be powered by
a unified health data platform with robust privacy and security
guardrails to deliver a transformative health experience. The
Thrive AI Health Coach will be trained on the latest peer-reviewed
science, biometric, lab and other medical data, as well as users'
personal preferences and goals around the five key daily
behaviors.
The new company will leverage resources from OpenAI and Thrive
Global, including Thrive Global's leading behavior change
methodology, Microsteps and content library. Thrive AI Health will
also take advantage of the latest developments in AI, including
enhanced long-term memory capabilities and a custom-developed
behavioral coaching model with domain-specific customization, to
empower individuals to take action across these five daily
behaviors and improve health outcomes.
"Recent advancements in artificial intelligence present an
unprecedented opportunity to make behavior change much more
powerful and sustainable," said DeCarlos
Love, Thrive AI Health CEO. "AI has shown a remarkable
ability to assimilate large datasets, extract actionable insights,
recognize patterns, and deliver personalized recommendations.
However, despite these technological advances, the current
landscape of large language models (LLMs) still falls short of
delivering a truly comprehensive and effective personalized
behavior change and coaching experience. Thrive AI Health Coach is
the product to solve the limitations of current AI and LLM-based
solutions by providing personalized, proactive, and data-driven
coaching across the five daily behaviors. This is how it will
improve health outcomes, reduce healthcare costs and significantly
impact chronic diseases worldwide."
"Through AI, we can make health and wellness opportunities more
accessible for all," says Alice
Walton, founder of the Alice L. Walton Foundation, Heartland
Whole Health Institute, and the Alice L. Walton School of Medicine.
"Thrive AI Health offers the potential of increasing access to
tools that can change behaviors and ultimately increase quality of
life."
The aim for the AI Health Coach is to finally reduce the
trendlines on chronic diseases, which are skyrocketing around the
world. In the U.S. alone, around 90% of our $4.1 trillion in healthcare spending — 17% of
GDP, up from 5% in 1960 — is for the treatment of chronic and
mental health conditions. A staggering 129 million Americans have
at least one chronic condition, and in 2023, eight chronic
conditions, including cardiovascular diseases, depression and
diabetes, hit all-time highs. The status quo is unsustainable — a
challenge that AI-driven hyper-personalized coaching is uniquely
positioned to address.
Given that chronic diseases — like diabetes and cardiovascular
diseases — are directly related to daily behaviors but not
distributed equally across demographics, the Thrive AI Health Coach
will leverage the power of AI to reach underserved communities. Dr.
Gbenga Ogedegbe, Professor of
Population Health & Medicine and Director, NYU Langone's
Institute for Excellence in Health Equity, will serve as Health
Equity Advisor to Thrive AI Health.
Thrive AI Health has established research partnerships with
leading academic institutions and medical centers which will
include bringing the AI Health Coach to their communities.
Stanford Medicine, the Alice L.
Walton School of Medicine and the Rockefeller Neuroscience
Institute at West Virginia University
are launch partners.
"Working together with Stanford
Medicine and Thrive AI Health, we are excited to engage our
faculty and future physicians to explore the use of AI Health Coach
in ways that reflect our whole health approach," said Dr.
Sharmila Makhija, Founding Dean and
CEO of the Alice L. Walton School of Medicine. "We strongly believe
AI will positively change the future of health care, from medical
education to clinical care, and we are committed to leveraging this
technology to its full potential."
"At Stanford Health Care, we are committed to delivering
transformative digital experiences that enhance patient care,
enable cutting-edge research, and help train tomorrow's health
leaders," said Dr. Michael Pfeffer,
Chief Information and Digital Officer for Stanford Health Care. "We
are excited to explore the potential of AI Health Coach to advance
these goals for the benefit of patients and providers alike."
"For the last five years, the Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute
has partnered with Thrive Global, conducting clinical research
studies involving over 3,000 participants linking our Human
Operating System and AI-driven real time digital health insights
with Thrive Global's behavior change methodology, Microsteps and
content," said Dr. Ali Rezai,
Director of the Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute. "We are excited
about this next stage collaboration with Thrive AI Health to
accelerate the impact of personalized coaching to improve health,
especially in rural America."
About Thrive Global
Founded by Arianna
Huffington in 2016, Thrive Global is a leading behavior change
technology company with the mission to improve productivity and
health outcomes – one Microstep at a time. Thrive helps individuals
and organizations improve well-being, performance and mental
resilience with its AI-powered behavior change technology platform.
Thrive's Microsteps – small, science-backed steps to improve health
and productivity – have been adopted by employees at more than 200
organizations in over 160 countries, from frontline and call center
workers to executives at multinational companies. For more
information, visit www.thriveglobal.com.
Contacts
Libby Duke
Head of Communications, Thrive Global
libby@thriveglobal.com
917-698-4993
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