Allison interviews Gözde Büyükacaroğlu, vivoo co-founder and COO, about their at-home urinalysis system. Vivoo includes a single-use test strip and a mobile app that together allow the user to get rapid and accurate urine analysis to assess several categories of health and wellness.
To use the system, the user urinates on the test strip which contains a grid of test areas and reference colors. Then using the mobile app, the user takes a photo of the strip which is processed by the vivoo mobile app.
Using advanced processing of the test strip image, vivoo finds and isolates all regions on the strip and corrects for lighting variations using the reference colors. The corrected data is sent to machine learning models trained to predict parameter levels based on color and shape.
Vivoo gives real-time data on nine wellness parameters including ketones, pH, water specific gravity, calcium, magnesium, vitamin C, sodium, and oxidative stress. Vivioo’s recommendation engine translates this data into a tailored diet and their AI assistant helps guide the user through each step and answers questions you may have. Vivoo is not intended for diagnosing diseases or other conditions.
Vivoo has also recently launched a women’s health product that uses similar technology to determine pH, ovulation, and fertilization levels as well as pregnancy.
Vivoo follows all HIPAA regulations and does not sell users’ health data.
Learn more at https://vivoo.io
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Transcript of Video:
Allison: Medical health is obviously something every single person is interested in. And the company Vivu has some at-home testing that I’ve never seen anything like before. So I’m here with Gözde and she’s going to say her last name for me. Okay.
Gözde Büyükacaroğlu: I’m Gözde Büyükacaroğlu. It’s a really difficult surname I know. It’s also really difficult in my home country too, by the way.
Allison: Okay. It’s awesome. Where are you from?
Gözde Büyükacaroğlu: I’m from Istanbul, Turkey.
Allison: Oh, wow. Okay, great. So let’s talk about what you’ve got. You’re doing an audio podcast as well as video. So describe what you have in your hands.
Gözde Büyükacaroğlu: Okay. Can you give me my phone? So this is an at-home urine test. It’s only available on the market like more than five years.
Allison: So basically- This is a piece of paper with some colored squares on the strip on the end of it.
Gözde Büyükacaroğlu: So you have to urinate on it and then take a test from the app. It looks like that.
Allison: So she’s tapping on an app and it’s going to tell us to urinate on it?
Gözde Büyükacaroğlu: Wait 90 seconds and then scan the strip. It looks like that.
Allison: And what kind of data can we get from this?
Gözde Büyükacaroğlu: So let me show. After you scan it, you can see your water consumption level, your pH, your ketone, calcium, magnesium, vitamin C, sodium, oxidative citrate, and protein. And we are not just showing the data because let’s say my urine magnesium is low, but what does urine magnesium mean in the first place? So we are giving some educational content. We are showing your history like that.
Allison: So you can see like if it’s going down. Oh, and it does it show you what you should eat in order to fix it?
Gözde Büyükacaroğlu: Yes. So we are not providing supplement and et cetera. We are basically like telling you what you eat or what you don’t eat to improve your data. So it’s basically like we are giving the nutritional advice based on your result and some metrics that we ask to you. And basically it’s a personalized advice that you can learn your body what they need and you can consume your foods based on that data.
Allison: This is great. One of my complaints, I always talk about sleep data is they never tell you what to do about it. You just know, boy, you didn’t sleep, but this tells you what to do about it. Now you said this strip has been around for a long time, but what is it called? It’s called Vivoo Wellness Test.
Gözde Büyükacaroğlu: It’s available.
Allison: Where is it from?
Gözde Büyükacaroğlu: So basically it’s available on Amazon, our website, on Sam’s Club, Target. We are on retail and online too.
Allison: So basically- So these are disposable, obviously.
Gözde Büyükacaroğlu: Yes. Just single use.
Allison: Okay. All right. But now you’ve got some other products out here that do some of the same thing, but not in a disposable strip.
Gözde Büyükacaroğlu: Yes. So this year we launched Women’s Health product. So basically there are so much like the period tracker apps on the market and you can track your period, you can learn your ovulation levels with the mathematical calculations, but also we are providing at home pregnancy test, at home ovulation test, and pregnancy test. It looks like that. We are measuring LH, HG and- So this is a very thin, long strip. Yes.
Allison: Again, you pee on it?
Gözde Büyükacaroğlu: Yes, pee on it or pee and dip it and then take a test from here like that.
Allison: She’s working in the app. She’s opened up the ovulation test. I didn’t know that from urine you could find out if somebody was ovulating.
Gözde Büyükacaroğlu: Yes, of course. Think about the pregnancy test. It’s also urine based too because some hormones are in the urine.
Allison: Okay, but I didn’t know that was true of ovulation. I thought it was only temperature and you were kind of a guideline.
Gözde Büyükacaroğlu: Basically urine is like a really good resourceful, resourceful based off of our body. There are more than like 30,000 biomarkers in the urine. It’s just like the need when we develop the measurement methodologies of that hormones, biomarkers, and everything else, you can learn so much about your, from your urine.
Allison: I’ve been ignoring it all these years.
Gözde Büyükacaroğlu: And it’s so easy to use. You have to pee on it like every day about five times. It’s not like the blood test. It’s so accessible.
Allison: Right.
Gözde Büyükacaroğlu: So after pee on it, you can scan from the app like that from here.
Allison: She’s holding the, she’s holding the strip up to the camera on her phone in the app. She’s having to do it backwards and blind there.
Gözde Büyükacaroğlu: So it’s a little tricky, but that step would go through and analyze the, to tell you. Like like ovulation. So you can see your level. Is it high or low? You can see your pregnancy, like the, is it your negative or positive with the pregnancy test? And you can also learn your fertility level based on the at home test too. So it’s so, it’s really important for the woman who wants to pregnant or not to be pregnant.
Allison: Both.
Gözde Büyükacaroğlu: Both are important at certain times.
Allison: So the fertility level, what does that measuring?
Gözde Büyükacaroğlu: It’s measuring any hormone and it shows the quality of your eggs basically. So if you are like the more than 30, 35 years old, basically menopause is a question or if you want to have a children or something else, the quality of the eggs are really important. So basically all in the urine.
Allison: Yes.
Gözde Büyükacaroğlu: You just urinate. That’s all. You can do everything else.
Allison: That’s amazing. Okay. So what else do you have?
Gözde Büyükacaroğlu: We launched our smart, our first version of the smart toilet like two years ago. So this is the version two. It’s look like that. You can put on the bedrooms and toilet. And then you can click on the take a test button and then we captured the urine and that’s all. You can see your result from the app.
Allison: You don’t have to do anything.
Gözde Büyükacaroğlu: Just click on the take a test button and see your result.
Allison: And so now you don’t need to use the little paper sticks.
Gözde Büyükacaroğlu: No, nothing else. It looks like that. You can see your water consumption, hydration level from the app.
Allison: So this is does all of what all of these tests do or?
Gözde Büyükacaroğlu: It’s just for the hydration. It’s a starting point for us. And in the next years we will develop more parameters too.
Allison: Very good. Very good. Now you’re going to stick me and take my blood now. We’re done with the easy stuff. What are you doing here?
Gözde Büyükacaroğlu: So this is our first blood test. It’s really important for us because all these years we work on the urine. But this is our first blood test. So you can take your blood from your finger like that.
Allison: So she’s got a little tiny thing looks like a USB stick and it’s got a little prick thing in it.
Gözde Büyükacaroğlu: There is needle here. So you can get the needle here. Put it here and you can take your blood. So with this information. You can open it and put your finger here. This capillary tube take your blood. And then you can put it in these our boxes like that and wait 20 minutes. After 20 minutes you just scan from the our application. That’s all.
Allison: So the camera looks at this pitot tube you said?
Gözde Büyükacaroğlu: Yes. So here when you take blood, the blood will collapse based on the inflammation level on your body. The velocity is really important because the velocity shows us your inflammation level. It means we will measure the distance here and you can see your inflammation level from an app. Inflammation.
Allison: Okay, very good. So I’ve got to ask you about the security of all this data that’s floating around. So I’ve just put in something about my fertility is in this app and I’m living in a state where maybe that’s going to cause me physical harm. How are you protecting my data?
Gözde Büyükacaroğlu: So first of all, we are following all data security rules like HIPAA. There’s a compliance called HIPAA. So we are following every rule about it. We are also following the ICO regulations about data security too. So basically we are dealing with it and it’s really important and we understand how important health data is. So everything is encrypted and we are basically compliant with the loss of GDPR all over the world and also state GDPRs like the California Act too. And basically we are encrypted everything. We are not selling your data. This is not our business model.
Allison: Thank you.
Gözde Büyükacaroğlu: This is not our business model and we are not planning to do that. We are just basically developing more product with your data.
Allison: Doing the analysis of it?
Gözde Büyükacaroğlu: Yes. Like basically when you urinate on the strips, based on your urine results, we are giving the personalized advice. So we are using your urine to give you more feedback about.
Allison: That data is still my data.
Gözde Büyükacaroğlu: Yes.
Allison: Not your data. It’s my data.
Gözde Büyükacaroğlu: Yes. Basically if you are getting that advice, it’s based on your urine, not mine.
Allison: There you go. All right, Gözde. This was very interesting. I’ve never seen anything like this. This is fantastic. So where would people find Vivoo products?
Gözde Büyükacaroğlu: From our website, vivoo.io, from Amazon, and if they are in United States, please go to the Sam’s Club or Target stores. We are all over the United States right now.
Allison: And it’s spelled V-I-V-O-O.
Gözde Büyükacaroğlu: Yes.
Allison: Very good. Thank you very much.
Gözde Büyükacaroğlu: Thank you so much too.