Optimal Ways to Use Wearables with Ravi Komatireddy, MD, MCTI

What this episode covers

Dr. Ravi Komatireddy, MD, MCTI is the founder and CEO of Daytona Health, a digital health startup that combines the power of algorithms, human experts, and behavior change science to help you make and implement better health decisions. He is a board-certified internal medicine physician and the first wireless digital health scholar at the Scripps Translational Science Institute, where he earned a masters in clinical translational investigation. Previously, he co-founded and served as Chief Medical Officer of 2 funded digital health startups, Lumiata Inc. and Reflexion Health Inc., and helped introduce a digital health model to medical startups operating in Nairobi, Kenya health tech ecosystem. In this episode, Ravi and I discuss the field of digital health and wearable technology. Named the top fitness trend of 2023 by the American College of Sports Medicine, devices like Apple Watches, Fitbits, Ouras, and Whoops are not only user-friendly tools to track your fitness progress – they can also offer personalized insight into your long-term health. “Things that used to take rooms full of people in labs in a hospital, we can now make them smaller, better, cheaper, and available to connect to your smartphone through a wearable or through a portable lab.” Ravi breaks down the types of data these devices provide, how they collect their information, and the ways their numbers can be used to build healthier habits. We address questions including which brands offer the most accurate data and how much we should trust reports on recovery and sleep quality. “People who stay healthy and can maintain lifestyle changes, they have a really high commitment to themselves. And that is a trainable skill. The wearables play a role in helping you build the skill because they're tracking and holding you accountable to the activities, and you can measure that and see them over time.” Listen to the full episode to learn more about using wearables for optimizing your health and longevity. Here are the details of our conversation: [00:01:33] Ravi’s early work in digital health startups [00:03:26] Transitioning to work at Daytona Health [00:07:37] Defining digital health [00:10:49] What are wearables? [00:12:50] Wearable brands [00:17:42] Will using more devices provide better information? [00:20:22] How to interpret different types of data [00:24:51] Trusting data for decision-making [00:30:58] Data vs. Intuition [00:37:08] Using data for behavior change [00:43:48] Integrating digital health into the healthcare system