This week I am talking to Phil Bosua (@philbosh), CEO at Know Labs (@TheKnowLabs). Phil has a long and interesting background as an inventor and early producer of apps making over 600 before he moved on to invent the portable scanner “ScanBox” and LIFX – the reinvented wifi-connected color-tunable light bulb. He partnered with Ron Erikson to found Know Labs where they are using other parts of the light spectrum – in their case Bio-RFID (Body-Radio Frequency Identification) to carry out spectroscopy (video explainer) on molecules circulating in our bodies using radio frequency spectroscopy.
The company started out focusing on health and wellness and was looking to count calories and used the glucose circulating in the bloodstream as a proxy but as they developed this technique it became apparent that the glucose molecule was important for many more reasons than nutrition with the potential to impact millions of people who suffer from Diabetes and need to monitor their glucose levels in real-time to manage their disease.
We discuss the potential for the technology to be applied in many other areas with a non-invasive monitor that is tuned to different molecules and Phil shares his incremental process to innovation that included hundreds of steps and refinements built on the insights developed from each stage of development. As he puts it he has hundreds of failed experimental antennas that demonstrate the process for each element of the design of the device – much like the story of all the things that go into making the “simple” pencil.
Listen in to hear where Know Labs are in the development of their Non-Invasive Continuous Glucose Monitor (NICGM). Having proven the technology they have reached the prototyping phase for the device and are working through the FDA process for approval for the device while they refine the technology to minimize it and speed up the data processing to offer real-time Glucose levels
Listen live at 4:00 AM, 12:00 Noon or 8:00 PM ET, Monday through Friday for the next week at HealthcareNOW Radio. After that, you can listen on demand (See podcast information below.) Join the conversation on Twitter at #TheIncrementalist.
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Raw Transcript
Nick van Terheyden
Hello. And today, I’m delighted to be joined by Phil Bosua. He is the CEO of Know labs. Phil, thanks for joining me today.
Phil Bosua
It’s great to be here. I’ve been listening to your podcast and can’t wait to participate in
Nick van Terheyden
one. So if you would tell us a little bit about your background, it’s certainly diverse, a little bit unusual. How did you get to this point, we’re going to get into what you’re doing it no labs and where you are. But what was your journey to this point?
Phil Bosua
It’s been long. But I’ll try and give you the quickest version I can. I made an app that was on the App Store. On day one, I saw this app starting coming. And also, that’s going to take over the world and be amazing. So I stopped what I was doing, started making apps and there was only 500 apps on the store that day. So it was very proud to have one of them. And then went on to make about 600 apps. But when that got a bit too crowded, I then discovered this thing called startups, which was, I was on a big country, out in the middle of nowhere on the island of Australia, and I had never heard of startups, which sounds weird now. So just I was like, what they give you money if you have a good idea. So lots of good ideas. So I started down that path, did a Kickstarter, which became was heading towards the world’s biggest Kickstarter at the time, that was for a company called Life x. And so I basically invented the smart light bulb, the light bulb be turned on and off with your phone. Then got Koya capital funding with that startup. So that was like, awesome, moved to Silicon Valley, to hang out with those guys, and, you know, learn a lot from them. And then, you know, as startups go like it, it got acquired, life X got acquired, so that was good. But I’d moved on just slightly before that happened. And then I went up to Seattle, met Ron Erickson, who was actually the founder of no labs. And they were working with light bass spectroscopy, trying to find different analytes or different, you know, basically analyze substances using LED technology. We had to tell what they were. And he said, we’re struggling to productize Do you think he could take a look at our technology and, you know, see if you can do anything with it. So spent six weeks, we’ve been looking into all that. And we decided to swing for the fences and try a non invasive blood glucose monitor.
Nick van Terheyden
Yeah, so you, you bring that up. And of course, that’s like a huge deal. It’s this massive leap. And to be clear, through the course of diabetes and monitoring of diabetes, we’ve learnt and understood more, we had, you know, very old technology, then we have finger sticks, which was revolutionary at the time, you know, the ability to do that in the home. And, you know, now even continuous glucose monitors, and I’ve experienced them, but they are invasive, because they essentially insert a needle into you. They’ve gotten some technology. But you’re talking about a whole revolution around this, which is non invasive, for the benefit of those folks listening. Help people understand how that’s even possible, because it seems like it’s science fiction, and I know science fiction becomes fact. But we’re not quite there yet.
Phil Bosua
Getting close on this one. Yeah. No, I mean, what’s there’s a saying that, you know, new technology seems like magic at first. And, you know, I agree with that, like, I know how it all works. That’s not magic to me. But we basically use the same type of phenomena that light based devices use, like an oximeter, or heart rate monitor, or anything that has a little pulsing led, like on an Apple Watch, or Fitbit. It’s the same idea. But what I figured out was, if you can do all that with light, you can probably do it with radio waves. Because for those people, I don’t want to get too techie or sciency here, but if you if people understand the electromagnetic spectrum, light is the same thing as Wi Fi. It’s just a different way speed that the weight goes up and down. Right, so Exactly. So I was like, if you could do all, you know, monitor what’s going on in the body and why I just had 100 that you could probably do with radio waves. So I went out and bought a bunch of equipments, then about six months. Testing, experimenting was a lot of hard, long hours. But we finally started to get triggers for the cold triggers for blood glucose using radio waves. And then we just further developed and, yeah, where we are now.
Nick van Terheyden
So you’re right. I mean, the spectrum is exactly the Athan, we visually see a very small slice of it, there are, you know, different ends. And obviously, x ray, as an example, is in one of those ends, which has potential negative effects, you’re in a different spectrum, you’re in the radio frequency the same as we use? I’m, I’m guessing, since I don’t know, but I’m not suggesting it’s in an FM or am but for people, you know, intellectually to think about it, it’s in the radio wave spectrum that we’re bathed in at this point. Is that true?
Phil Bosua
Yeah, absolutely. It’s, it’s very, very safe. I mean, we could spend five or 10 minutes talking about the safety. But I mean, that’s up to you. But it’s a we’ve done all the testing, it’s very safe to wear our device for 24 hours, is about the same as a five minute browsing on Facebook, on your phone. So we’re very, very low power, and even cell phones, you know, if you spent two minutes on a cell phone, that’d be about the same as 24 hours using our device. So it’s, it’s so low, because our device only has to go 234 inches around. So it’s very low power.
Nick van Terheyden
Yeah. Yeah. So I think there’s lots of varied information around the safety, and that that really wasn’t the purpose of sort of making that analogy. But just to sort of understand that spectrum and you’ve taken a slice of it a safe slice, if you were doing this with X ray frequency, then that would be a different safety issue, but you’re in a different set of the spectrum. But you’re essentially, it. If you’re taking those radio waves, you’re projecting them into the interstitial cells, and then picking up the reflections Is that what’s going on?
Phil Bosua
Yes, it’s the we push, we have a transmit antenna, and a receive antenna on the device and just imagine it’s a sizable watch, then what we do is we transmit and that goes into the interstitial fluid, or basically everything, the blood, everything, and then we get a received signal, we can tell how much energy is hitting our receive antenna. And then what we do is that certain frequencies, very, very specialized multi frequencies, it’s like, it’s actually quite complicated. We can see different molecules, the good way to explain it, it’s basically the molecule at certain frequencies, it will resonate the molecules, and then you’ll get like a peak resonance at very, very specified frequencies, it’s similar to when you run your finger around a wineglass when, if you have the right pressure, the right speed and a certain amount of wine in the glass, it’ll start to vibrate and, you know, creates that sort of singing noise. So exactly the same type of phenomena, except for we’re just doing it at a molecular level with radio waves.
Nick van Terheyden
Right? And for those of us that do that, and you know, my family is constantly irritated by the fact that I’m actually quite experts, with almost any one of the things that you notice is that you get the concentric rings in a circular glass of the harmonics from whatever the frequency is based on, you know, those metrics that you describe which it sounds like you’re picking up based on the individual molecules that you’ve targeted.
Phil Bosua
Yes, yeah. It’s the molecules and the effect that those molecules have on your body. So we can basically see changes in the body by how these radio waves are interacting with your body. Yeah, it’s, it’s and then glucose is just one frequency set. So we’ve had successful tests on blood alcohol, and some like alcohol consumption to blood alcohol. We’ve used aspirin and Tylenol as a proxy for other metabolize drugs and we can see the effects of both of those things. Oxygens really easy like if you have your hand or on the device, then you hold your breath The oxygen, you know, we see you deoxygenated. And then when you take a deep breath, we see it come back up. So, but each molecule is a different frequency set. So,
Nick van Terheyden
so the question and before we dive into the continuous glucose monitor, which is really the focus here, I just it, it’s seems like this is an obvious next step. But you can target multiple molecules, you’re essentially opening up a whole new avenue of what I would call continuous monitoring of molecules within the human body at some level. I don’t know if there’s some limitations based on the projection of those radio waves, but it’s essentially Open Season. Is that true?
Phil Bosua
Yeah. That’s a good way to describe it. Yeah, that’s exactly what we’re doing.
Nick van Terheyden
Wow, that’s really exciting. So let’s talk about no lab. So you, you came to this, you had your connection with Ron Erickson, as you described, you focused on this. Was there a specific reason that you focused on glucose? Or was this just that was where he was? Tell us a little bit about that journey?
Phil Bosua
Yeah, Ron was sort of dabbling in the technology and trying to sort of further the technology using light. And then when we decided because he’s, you know, pitch to me, I guess was, can we productize this somehow. And then, I actually started looking at counting calories, the intake of calories, non invasively in the body, that was something that was very meaningful to me. And then what we figured out is, carbohydrates turn into glucose. So we actually, for a few weeks, we’re going okay, well, we’ll just use glucose as a sort of proxy, or we will have to extrapolate out because it needs fats and proteins as well to count calories. But anyway, we sort of went down that calorie counting path using glucose for about two weeks. And then I still remember the moment vividly Ron and I just basically looked at each other and went, why the hell are we doing calories if we can do to look? Like literally, it was staring us in the face for a few weeks, and we went? Yeah, let’s just do glucose and just be laser focused on that, even though we know we can do all these other things as well. It’s a big market. I think. If we can get non invasive, easy monitoring of people’s blood glucose levels, I think we can help genuinely help improve the impact of diabetes on the world. So that’s what we’ve been doing the last four years is just glucose glucose glucose.
Nick van Terheyden
So for those of you just joining, I’m Dr. Nick the incrementalist today I’m talking to Phil Bhatia. He is the CEO of no labs, we were just talking about the journey to the point of this continuous glucose monitor using essentially a radio frequency approach to analysis at the interstitial level focused on the glucose molar molecule. And you just pointed out something and I think it’s important to understand this is not been, you know, an instant overnight success already sort of looks at these things. We see the success, but you talked about four years of development of getting to there. Can you tell us a little bit about the learning experience? And what’s gone on through those four years? What, what what really gave you some inflection points to where you are now, which is, you know, on a clear trajectory to provide this continuous glucose monitor that’s non invasive.
Phil Bosua
Well, I, I took a leaf out of Edison’s book. It’s like, sophisticated, smart brute force. So the story I know is that, you know, when he was developing the first light bulb, he went through 1000 Different filaments. And, and so it’s not you don’t go through, you know, I was really into it blindly, or I didn’t like, think of 1000 different things to test and line them all up. You know, he’s, you pick the first one you think might work and you use it and it burns out and you analyze why it burned down, got some temperatures sense, I mean, surely had some sort of sophisticated temperature sensing, but however you approach it, you just basically choose the most likely path, rapidly test and be very smart with your analysis and you use whatever you learnt from that, to predict what you think might work next. But you really, really like when I’m saying rapidly, and brute force like it Even like I had to design my own antenna, because antennas aren’t designed, like, you know, like radio wave antennas, like even small ones that are in your phone or in your Wi Fi router. They’re not designed for this type of application. They’re designed to send packets very efficiently, we had to actually on purpose, create an inefficient antenna. So I went through 250 antenna designs, so each one I was testing, but make it test to analyze why it was better than than the last one or worse, and then make adjustments on my next antenna designed and then do another one. So I bought all this antenna design equipment. And we learned how to do all that. And so I’ve got a box of about 250 antennas that we went through to finally come up with the first the antenna that we use now, which is basically helps us find all these things. So that’s sort of an illustration of how I approach it. And then you’ve got the data science aspect as well, creating the algorithms, the set up all the infrastructure, but we have to do custom code to read all the radio waves, because they we read them very, very fast. And we read a lot of them. So it’s it’s like that analogy of the antenna design, to what else indeed is really just a, you know, a way to explain my process. And I’ve done that with every aspect of this, like inventing something that some people think it’s like, Oh, you got to invent one thing. It’s not really like that at all you, you have to invent like 13 162 things, to get one overall invention, even test procedures, quality control, like everything, you have to basically start from scratch, if it’s true, innovative, brand new technology.
Nick van Terheyden
You know, it’s interesting, you describe that I’m always looking for themes, you know, the incremental insights. And what that reminds me of, if you’ve ever heard the story of the pencil, and how a pencil is created, and everybody looks at it, and it’s this simple thing. But when you go back and track through all of the innovations that came to make up that simple piece of equipment, there are hundreds and hundreds of you know, not only manufacturers but all the this innovation or insight that sort of contributes, and I’m always looking for those sort of insights to provide to others, you know, how do I achieve the same success? How do I get to that point, and it sounds like not only that process of failure that informs the next level of innovation, but it’s the attention to all the little elements of detail that says I’m not just going to take something off the shelf, in this case, that drives you know, the next step in that whole process. As you think about where you are now, tell us a little bit about the status. So you know, there’s information out there, we’ll link to it in the blog post. But where is no labs? And where are you in the whole process of getting a continuous glucose monitor out?
Phil Bosua
Where Why can the final throes of prototyping, right now we can, if you were had your arm on our prototype, and you sat still, for three hours, were well within FDA tolerances, like our daughters, you know, within FDA tolerance to have a non invasive blood glucose monitor. But clearly, that’s not practical for people to sit on a bench for three hours in a row. So the technology is sound, and it works and just working fine. All these other molecules as well. So we’re, what we’re doing now is we’re doing deep data science testing, and algorithm adjustment to make it so we can do the same thing in 60 seconds, instead of three hours, but it’s, it’s exactly the same process, same concept, same algorithms, but they just need refinement and adjustment. And then when we can do 60 seconds, realistically, we should be able to do five, one by 10 seconds, you know, using the same concept, but it I just want to make it really clear that the 90% even maybe 95% of the work was just getting it to work reliably every time and we will technically add that now so I look at it. It’s like a you know, it’s the coat of paint on a car. Really the car drives you can do that but you can’t No one’s gonna drive around with a you know, bare metal car because of the rust in the first few weeks or something so, but in my mind, it’s pretty much done. We’re just going to nail painting.
Nick van Terheyden
And that processing that the time taken is that a processing power is that a, a way of approaching the data analysis? What’s the sort of the key to that?
Phil Bosua
Yeah, it’s the amount of data we collect. So we can collect all the data over a three hour test, when somebody just some glucose up, we can see the rise from from a baseline sort of fasting state, we see a rise, a peak and a fall and then a, what we call like a tail off. So it’s just you get all the data. And now that’s easy for me to to detect glucose, non invasively, with all the data. And now I’ve just got to convert all those algorithms where I can just do it, you know, just a quick slice, but it’s all in there, right? Like, if I can see all the data over a three hour period, then it’s in the data for a one minute period or even a 10 second period, it’s all there, it’s just extracting that out. And what you’re going to do there is just basically make the algorithm more complex and a little more refined.
Nick van Terheyden
Right? So you’re clearly made huge amounts of process, you know, you’re close to, you know, still in the prototyping stage or going through testing of the see thinking about the FDA approval process. What’s, what do you see? What are you excited? I mean, aside from obviously getting this out there, where do you see this going?
Phil Bosua
I’m Jay, like, so many different directions. I’ll leave you with my big vision for it. I’m not saying this as puzzle, but I not saying it’s not either i I’m very much stand on, I have to experiment and see the data myself before I think, yes, we can now create a refined production version of this. But everything I’ve learned and read and researched would say that we can probably see white blood cells, levels, all the different types. I think there’s five different types, IG eg or coverslip. But I didn’t deep research on this about two or three years ago. And so if we can pick out different levels of white blood cells in your body non invasively, every five minutes to say we did a white blood cell test every five minutes. I think we could radically change how people look at their, but autoimmune diseases or symptoms, we would basically be seeing those levels change pre symptomatic. What before, since and in my mind, like I know leukemia is often diagnosed or initially diagnosed through white blood cells, there’s a lot of things. It’s not like, if you take a white blood cell tissue and say, Oh, you have leukemia, it says, Oh, these are off in this direction. Let’s do further testing. So, you know, my biggest vision for this is to give pre symptomatic early warning, detection for cancers, other terminal illnesses in even the flu, right, like all of those things, we may be able to tell people they need to go to a doctor earlier. And I think the cure for cancer is early detection. I don’t think it’s
Nick van Terheyden
interesting. I mean, I there’s so many sort of directions as a, you know, constant monitoring device. I mean, this is wearables on steroids, for the potential for providing insights on an ongoing basis, we’re moving to this medical home environment where people are coming out of hospitals or trying to keep them out of hospitals. And certainly from an aging standpoint, the elderly population is looking for better monitoring that can be achieved with a higher level of accuracy. So tremendous potential, you know, and quite frankly, a continuous glucose monitor that you know, is non invasive, you know, constantly providing data, I think is going to be tremendously exciting. That alone is going to revolutionize the space for millions and millions of people, either diabetic or pre diabetic that we see. So very exciting times. Unfortunately, as usual, I’ve run out of time just remains for me to thank you for coming on the show. Just very excited about the opportunities and the progress that you’ve made. Phil thanks for joining me on The show today
Phil Bosua
absolutely thank you
