Rise
There’s no shortage of fitness tracking apps and devices these days. You might even call it a glut. There’s MyFitnessPal for tracking calories. RunKeeper for logging runs. FitBit for counting steps and monitoring your heart rate. And soon, Apple will add its all-encompassing Apple Watch to this already lengthy list.
But while these technologies are great at collecting data about your health and activity, they’re less effective when it comes to giving advice on what to actually do with all that data. That’s where Rise comes in. Since it was founded last year, the San Francisco-based company has connected thousands of users with hundreds of live, registered dietitians for $10 to $15 a week. The dietitians are assigned a set of clients, and they give these clients feedback on every meal they eat, providing encouragement along the way.
It’s not unlike working with an in-person health counselor, except that it’s a fraction of the price. The goal, according to Rise co-founder and CEO Suneel Gupta, is to make Rise the connective tissue between all of these health technologies, by giving users affordable access to a trained specialist who can make sense of it all.
On Tuesday, the company took one more step toward that goal, announcing a new integration with Apple HealthKit, which will allow users to send their nutritionists information on their fitness habits for the first time, as well as their dietary ones. “We feel like there’s a missing layer in this industry of personal health, which is: what do I do with all this advice and this data,” Gupta says. “That’s the role we want to play.”
Personal Nutritionist
Gupta, whose brother is CNN correspondent and neurosurgeon Dr. Sanjay Gupta, learned about the importance of personalized health at an early age as a kid who struggled with obesity. His parents were also overweight, and his father had diabetes and heart issues. “We were spending a good amount of time at the hospital in Detroit,” Gupta recalls, “but the overwhelming majority of getting us back on our feet relied on what we did at home.”
After trying and—like so many people—failing to stick to fad diets, Gupta’s family began working with a personal nutritionist to help get their health back on track. It wasn’t until years later, after Gupta stepped down as vice president of product development at Groupon, that he thought about translating that experience into a business.
To do that, he had to re-imagine the traditional model of health coaching, which typically depends on a client and a coach spending lots of time together. But time is money, and Gupta wanted to make the Rise experience affordable. So he and his team came up with a model he calls “microcoaching,” in which users upload photos of every meal and send their dietician a quick explanation of what they ate. That means the dietician can see all the messages she’s received from clients and respond to them at a time that’s convenient for her.
The HealthKit integration will now add fitness data to the mix, but Gupta says that’s just a start. The company is also in discussions with the makers of wearable fitness trackers and is contemplating ways to share this data with clients’ healthcare providers, while maintaining their privacy.
Communications is Constant
After just a year in business, Gupta says Rise is delivering similar, if not better, results to clients than in-person consultations. That stands to reason. With an in-person nutritionist, he explains, “you’re there for an hour and then you have 6 days and 23 hours to drop off, which a lot of people do.” But with Rise, the communication is constant.
According to Kevin Volpp, director of the Center for Health Incentives and Behavioral Economics at University of Pennsylvania, this is both the benefit and the challenge of such a model. “There are 5,000 plus waking hours that people aren’t having contact with a healthcare provider, and that’s one of the advantages to a mobile strategy,” he says, before adding that there’s a line between being engaged and being intrusive. “There’s an important balance to strike, and these technologies will have to figure out how to straddle the positives and the negatives of being a bigger part of people’s lives.”
In the end, Volpp believes Rise on the right track toward making health advice more accessible. “The people who are able and willing to come in in person for these interventions are a very self-selected group,” he says. “What these mobile interventions do is potentially extend the reach to a much broader group of people.”
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