Hand tracking tech for behaviour change to be tried at Stanford

“Our partnership with Crossover Health is a first-of-its-kind AI solution for behaviour change deployed within an evidence-based setting.” Klue’s collaboration at Stanford University is led by Dr. Christopher Gardner, Professor of Medicine and Director of Nutrition Studies at the Stanford Prevention Research Center.

Through this venture a five week clinical study was recently undertaken to explore the potential impact of Klue’s Mindful Eating Messenger and Hydration Coach on consumption behaviours and eating and drinking mindfulness.

The resulting work creates a unique opportunity to deepen the scientific understanding of dietary behaviours and the impact of wearable technology and personalised, real-time micro-nudges on dietary behaviour modification.

“How we eat is complex, an elaborate set of interacting behaviours, many of which we just don’t fully understand,” said Dr. Gardner. “Our nutrition studies research group was pleased to work with Klue to explore behaviours that impact eating, and how that might unlock new behaviours that can benefit us. Just sharing best practices with a patient, or sharing nutritional knowledge is not enough; time and again it has been proven that education efforts that increase knowledge often fail to lead to meaningful and lasting behaviour change. Making behaviour change easier through scalable science-based and real time coaching and monitoring is a very interesting new approach to pursue.”

Klue is also partnering with Crossover Health in its Bay Area clinics. Crossover Health is leading health activist employers across the U.S. in providing a comprehensive health management platform consisting of physical clinics, comprehensive virtual care, and digital health enabled population services.

“We see technology as a critical element of our care model, both to improve the patient experience and to amplify clinical outcomes. In our review of the market, we selected Klue as a partner based on their commitment to behaviour change, complementing our mission to curate and integrate evidence-based point solutions,” said Crossover Health Chief Strategy Officer, Dr. Karoline Hilu.

As part of the HLTH conference’s Announcement Spotlights sessions at 4:30 p.m. on 7th May, Vleugels will show how off-the-shelf wearables can recognise subtle, unique hand movements through Klue’s patent pending artificial intelligence-powered software.

Vleugels will illustrate how this in turn allows Klue to accurately extract and measure these real-time behaviours and power two new micro-nudge modules. The company will also be available throughout the event at Startup Street Kiosk S53.

“We are showing that the wrist’s movements themselves contain uniquely valuable insights from which we can unlock new behaviours in ways that weren’t previously possible,” said Vleugels.

“Because what we do with our hands is key to very important behaviours, like eating for instance, being able to read the hands’ movements for the first time opens the door to offering users automatic micro-nudges that can lead to better habits.”

The Mindful Eating Messenger module recognises when, how fast and how much a person consumes. It can then offer personalised, actionable micro-nudges to adopt specific consumption behaviours, such as eating more slowly or avoiding late-night snacking, empowering users to create and hold onto new habits that can turn around obesity or accelerate the achievement of top performance.

The new Hydration Coach allows users to set their own unique daily hydration goals, and automatically tracks progress against those goals, coaching users through the day to stay properly hydrated. Nudges and progress are personalised to each user and the particular demands of their day.