WHOOP Podcast - John Capodilupo, WHOOP Chief Technology Officer, talks 3.0 tech, the membership experience, and a pair of recent sleep studies validating WHOOP data.

Episode Date: July 17, 2019

CTO John Capodilupo discusses WHOOP technology and signal accuracy (5:24), how to wear your Strap to get the best data (8:44), constantly improving algorithms (15:12), 3.0 troubleshooting tips (17:21), using Bluetooth Low Energy (17:48), app and firmware updates (22:48), what to do if the lights won't turn on (24:13), membership services (27:53), a Cornell Alzheimer's study (34:09) and an Arizona insomnia study (37:31) that each used WHOOP, and the idea that everyone should have 24/7 access to their physiological data (41:17).Support the showFollow WHOOP: www.whoop.com Trial WHOOP for Free Instagram TikTok YouTube X Facebook LinkedIn Follow Will Ahmed: Instagram X LinkedIn Follow Kristen Holmes: Instagram LinkedIn Follow Emily Capodilupo: LinkedIn

We discovered that there were secrets that your body was trying to tell you that could really help you optimize performance, but no one could monitor those things. And that's when we set out to build the technology that we thought could really change the world. Welcome to the Whoop podcast. I'm your host, Will Ahmed, founder and CEO of Whoop, where we are on a mission to unlock human performance. Having recorded about 25 episodes on the WOOP podcast, I can truly say it's a great lens into understanding how high performers, top performers, do what they do. At WOOP, our clients range from the best professional athletes in the world to Navy SEALs,

to fitness enthusiasts, to Fortune 500 CEOs and executives. The common thread among WOOP members is a passion to improve. What does it take to optimize performance for athletes, for humans, really anyone? And now that we've just launched all-new whoop strap 3.0 featuring Woop Live, which takes real-time training and recovery analysis to the next level, you're going to hear how many of these users are optimizing their body with WOOP and with other things in their life. On this podcast, we dig deeper, we interview experts, we interview industry leaders across sports, data, technology, physiology, athletic achievement, you name it. How can you use data to improve? your body? What should you change about your life? My hope is that you'll leave these conversations with some new ideas and a greater passion for performance. With that in mind, I welcome you

to the WOOP podcast. We've developed a very cool algorithm that informs us of our confidence in the estimation of the heart rate based on a variety of factors, including the signal quality we're getting, the motion. So we're constantly monitoring over the whole WOOP population. And so when you write into support with an issue or just passively wearing whoop, if we see a pattern emerge, we'll take a look at the data, set up experiments, and then refine the algorithm. What's up, folks? Today we've got a special podcast for you. I sit down with my co-founder, our chief technology officer, John Capilupo. I've worked with John for seven years in building whoop. We met when we were, I think he was 19 and I was maybe 20. or 22 years old and we bonded over this idea of being able to continuously monitor the human body. He's been an amazing, amazing partner to me. I think he's one of the smartest people I've ever met in my life. And he's just been a brother to me in building this business. And

we talk about all things, Gen 3 and invalidation. So Gen 3, he wrote a great blog post about it. Some users recommended that we do a podcast. And so we jumped in to talk about the things that we're excited about with Gen 3, some of the issues that individuals have had, we explain those, we unpack some of the things that we've improved about it. We talk about membership services and how important we view the role of support to our customers. And John's actually been spending a ton of time with our customers, with membership services, talking to them. So we go into that. And then we talk about some validation that's come out recently. So Woop was involved in a study on Alzheimer's patients, which is close to my heart because I've lost family members with

Alzheimer's. And we also talk about a validation paper on sleep and insomnia. Both John and I have really shared a passion for figuring out how Whoop can play a role in medical literature, how we can help advance the conversation around medical literature, what we can give back to the community. And in turn, you know, it helps validate our technology. So I'll definitely get John back on here, Maybe we'll talk about the founding story or what it's like to build a technology business. But for now, please enjoy and here's John. All right, welcome to the WOOP podcast, Kappa. Thanks for having me.

It's kind of long overdue, actually. I feel like we should have done this a while ago. Although now we're going to talk today about the Gen 3 and Sleep Validation. This isn't going to be the most specific on founding whoop or what's next, but we've got some tactical things that we want to discuss. Definitely. So, okay, Gen 3 is in the world. I'm pumped about it.

you're pumped about it. Super excited. The whole team here at Woop, we're really excited to see it in customers' hands and so many customers' hands. We were kind of overwhelmed by the demand we had and working hard to fulfill every order, collecting a lot of great data, and it's great to see people enjoying the longer battery life and the great new pro-knit bands. Yeah, I mean, I think just as some background for our listeners, like the two of the biggest issues we got with Gen 2 from a criticism standpoint were the battery life being too short, So that was two days. Your team has got it now to five days, which I think is amazing.

And the band's not working great for specific audiences. And so we've got this new pro-knit band, which so far people have been loving, I think. Yeah, it feels so nice on your wrist. You forget you're wearing something there. And it also has this great ability to stay where it is, which is really good for a signal optimization. And that allows us to get better accuracy and just drive even better insights. Talk for a second about the important of signal accuracy, because I know you and I talk about this all the time, but I think most of our audience probably is unaware of just how hard what we do is on some level from a technical standpoint.

Yeah, definitely. The whoop strap uses a technique called photoplasmography, which is the idea of shining light at your skin. Some of it gets absorbed by various things, but a lot of it gets absorbed by how much blood is underneath the skin and kind of the smaller blood vessels at any given time. And then some of it doesn't get absorbed and it gets reflected back. And based on how much light gets reflected back is directly correlated with how much blood volume there was

at that point in time when we show in the light. And so what we see, what the whoops sees, is a function over time of how bright the light is that they got reflected back after it's gone through your blood. And this is correlating, moving with your heart beating. So when there's more blood volumes, because your heart just beat, When there's less, your heart is in kind of that rest period before the next beat.

And so this is what photoplasmography is, and that's what the whoopstrap uses. But the raw signal itself is incredibly noisy, as you can imagine, from that description. So if you're inside, underneath artificial lights, transition to an outdoor environment with the sun and infrared light, or if you are in a dark room, all three very different environments, and they make dramatic effects on the quality of this fundamental signal. And so from this signal, we've developed a set of subsistingual. sophisticated algorithms over the last seven years, actually we've been working on this problem, just dedicated on this problem to be able to take the signal in almost any condition,

filter out any of the noise sources, which includes these external light sources I just described, but also includes when you move the strap, no matter how tight you're wearing it, or how good the band is, will move slightly, and that sensor and skin contact will change. And when it changes, it introduces another noise signal into the thing we're measuring. And so that really can corrupt the data. And so you can imagine the data when you're at rest in a perfect environment. You see this really nice fluctuating signal, which is exactly your heart beating. But then if you move your wrist even slightly, the data looks so noisy by the human eye.

You can't even imagine that you'd ever be able to get heart rate out of it. But we have a great team of brilliant engineers here at WOOP. We've been working very hard on this problem. And we're able to take the additional data from our sensors on the WOOP and filter out the additional noise sources. And what's left is an estimation of the heart rate and also heart rate variability. And we do this continuously 24-7. We never turn off the sensors.

And so we do this all day on the whoop strap now with the 3.0 instead of on the phone and give back the reliable heart rate and heart rate variability information. The importance of signal quality going back to the original question is the algorithms, no matter how good they are, if there's no signal, when you hear signal and noise, signal is the good stuff what we're trying to measure. and that noise is all the bad stuff that's corrupting the data. And the signal quality plays an important role because no matter how good the algorithm is, if there's no signal at all, you have no hope of guessing what the heart rate could be because you have no basis of where it should be.

So we need some signal, a little bit of signal, and the more signal you have, the less hard the algorithm has to work to try to recover that and give you back an accurate heart rate. And so that's why position and placement and bands matter so much to the whoop, is the better positioned it is on your wrist, the less artificial data corruption we get, the easier it is for our algorithms to give a true heart rate. And what we've been working really hard on is in periods of time where the signal quality is low, not non-existent but low, being able to extract the same quality of heart rate estimation we can when you're at rest. Yeah, and I mean, that's the amazing thing that you've developed here,

is this ability to measure heart rate from the wrist and other areas of the arm. soon anywhere as accurately as a chest trap for nearly everyone now here's the thing there are individuals who have reported having trouble with their heart rate accuracy what do you say to those people to like what are some tips that they can do to try to improve their accuracy and is there anyone or it's just a loss cause yeah no we really believe here from all the data we've collected I think probably one of the largest data sets in the world of of just this problem that we've been studying, you know, just trying to get data from these LEDs and how much is coming back from your blood. Alongside chest straps too, right? Alongside chest trap data, yeah,

for a truth data set, and in some cases, ECGs as well. And so we have all of this truth data and this raw data. And we've seen it work in different conditions for all different skin tones, musculature, male, female, all different types of wrists, hairy wrists. And we've seen at work. And so there's hope that in any condition we're able to give that heart rate estimation. So if you're seeing problems, the first thing to check always is band positioning and band tightness. You want to wear your woup strap, ideally, about one inch below your wristbone on your non-dominant hand. You can wear it anywhere you want, but if you're having problems, what we would suggest is a standardized protocol that we know works really well. Right. So we suggest wearing it on your non-dominant hand

about one inch above your wristbone. And this is the positioning we've tried time and time again and seeing really strong signal quality. And so we know it's a great position. You also want to be wearing the woup strap fairly tight on your wrist, so much tighter than a normal watch or something like that, but actually not too tight. It's hard to describe without pictures or video. I like to say you want to have it as tight enough

to just be able to fit your pinky finger under the band, but probably have trouble pushing your pinky finger through the band. Correct. Yeah, that's a great way to describe it. And what this does is ensures that the sensors are in proper contact with your skin. If it's too loose, you'll get tons of this kind of noise artifact from moving. And if it's too tight, actually, you can prevent the blood flow in the capillaries, a tiny blood vessels underneath the surface of your wrist because it's too tight. The blood will be diverted away from there and go to other places.

And then you'll have no signal at all either. Right, right, right. And so it's a delicate balance between the two. But that's definitely the first thing to check, because that has the largest impact on signal quality is the band positioning and tightness. And then the second thing is if you're still having issues, try to move the band even further up your arm, so maybe two inches or something like that. And it's just have to do...

So closer to your forearm. Closer to your forearm, closer to your bicep, yeah. And the idea there is that there's a lot of tendons and different things in your wrist that when you move your fingers or your hands, you're actually dramatically at the scale of the sensor changing the positioning of the sensor. your wrist and people have different anatomies and things like that and that can really corrupt the signal. Do you think it would work for anyone to wear the sensor under their wrist versus on top? We've actually done a bunch of studies here on that exact question and we have seen

no statistically significant difference in the quality of the woup data from wearing it on the top of the wrist or the under the wrist. Now once again these are all statistical measures. So we can tell what happens overall and in our cases, but finding something that works for you, perhaps your anatomy, your skin tone, everything that goes into your positioning on the wrist. Maybe it does work slightly better for you under the wrist, but it's hard to prescribe that. So sometimes if you're having troubles, just playing around with the positioning slightly can have dramatic results. And then finally, the last thing for data quality, I would say, is if you're still having

issues after doing all these things we suggested, and you're doing an activity where your wrist is in constant use, so maybe like weightlifting and you're doing, you're doing it, you're doing different pressures and flexes of your wrist. That's just a hard problem because the signal we're getting is being corrupted all the time by the movement of your wrist. And so sometimes we recommend using one of our bicep bands or arm sleeves and wearing it, you know, up on the forearm or your bicep, where you won't have this additional noise source.

And we've seen really great results in improvement in the quality of our heart rate estimation by using those products. Yeah, I mean, I played squash competitively, as you know, and for me wearing the bicep band on my off arm so like my non-dominant harm i've found it has had a better signal quality than wearing it on my wrist definitely yeah squash uh just given the motion wrist motion and really sharp impacts uh with the ball and the racket and different things like that and so by wearing it on the bicep on your non-dominant hand you're allowing the signal quality to be much higher than it could otherwise and that once again allows our algorithms to work better and give you a better

heart rate estimation. Yeah, and I think it's worth really emphasizing here, too, that there's, uh, for, for the, the large majority of people, we're talking 98, 99% of the population, they don't see actually any issues with heart rate monitoring. What's interesting is these specific people who, for whatever reason, maybe it's the way they're wearing it or it's the activities that they're doing, they can occasionally see erratic heart rates. And so we're talking a little bit to, to these people right now, but I think that's where you, you can implement some of the things that Kappa is describing. Yeah, and one thing just so everybody knows,

we've developed a very cool algorithm here that informs us of our confidence in the estimation of the heart rate we just gave based on a variety of factors, including the signal quality we're getting, the motion, different things like that. And so we're constantly monitoring over the whole WOOP population what we believe the confidence in our estimation is. And so when you write into support with an issue

or just passively wearing Whoop, we're still looking at all of this data and always working to improve those cases if we see a pattern emerge, like squash or something like that, we'll take a look at the data, set up experiments, and then refine the algorithm and make a release where it helps solve those problems. It's such a good point because I think one of the fascinating things that the data collection team has done here at Whoop is really, really target very specific and very broad different concepts of data collection. You and I used to be critical. I remember years ago of some Fitbit study that was showing heart rate accuracy on like a white male running on a treadmill

indoors and all those you know all those things i just said the fact like lighter skins easier than dark skin uh less hairy is easier than hairy right uh indoors is easier than outdoors part of the advantage i think to the fact that we uh started initially working with athletes is they have actually really diverse backgrounds you've got very dark skin you've got very light skin you've got people who are very muscular, you have people who are bigger and have more fat on their on their wrists. And all of these things actually affect the signal quality, right? Yeah, tremendously. And that's been really awesome to see here at WOOP is how much we invest and how much people care about data quality and signal accuracy and things like that.

And so we've been collecting data since 2012 on all different types of activities and really trying to both, one, mimic the real world and just generic activities walking, around or specific sports and things like that. And then, too, also having controlled laboratory studies so we can get baselines for algorithms. But we weigh both in equal importance, and that really allows our algorithms, you know, when we train them, to see a wide variety of different things instead of just, oh, this was what it was like in the laboratory. Hopefully it works in the real world. We've collected, what, like hundreds of thousands of hours of heart rate data alongside

chest straps and ECGs? Yeah, usually just in the creation of the Gen 3. and then from all the data from back in the Gen 2 creation and before that the Gen 1 we have... We might be at a million hours now. Tons and tons of...

So you and I have been totally pumped about the Gen 3 launch. The vast, vast majority of people have given us unbelievable feedback on it. So we love hearing from WOOP members. That said, we have seen a few issues for specific individuals and we want to run through those.

You wrote a great blog post about this, So I encourage anyone listening who's interested to check out the locker because you go into this as well. Let's start with connectivity because the WOOP 3.0 has a different Bluetooth compatibility than the 2.0. And we've seen some, you know, we've seen some developments around how that changes data transfer. Yep. Yep. So the Woop 3 uses a pretty ubiquitous technology now, Bluetooth low energy. as compared to Bluetooth classic in the 2.0. Bluetooth low energy is what it sounds like. It uses less energy,

which is great for wearables and whoops straps and all sorts of different kinds of things. And it's really become a standard in almost all technologies for wireless connectivity and communications. And so the move to use Bluetooth low energy on the 3.0 was an obvious decision, and we've been working hard to make that happen.

The thing is, when you're communicating with Bluetooth low energy, It's your device implements it, and then the mobile device, so Android or iOS, it also has implemented. So everything from the ground up, not just the Gen 3 Woop strap, but the Gen 3 Woop app on both iOS and Android had to be rewritten in this new technology stack to use the Bluetooth low energy instead of the classic Bluetooth. And so it was a huge overhaul, and we're really, you know, still with any new technology that we develop here, there's always going to be some kinks. We did a long beta test here at Woop, and then we've been getting a lot of great feedback from the field about different cases where it works well, other cases where it doesn't work as well. And for the biggest, I think, difference between Gen 2 and Gen 3 in terms of a user's experience with WOOP is around data lag. And specifically, if you kill the WOOP app when you have the Gen 3, because of the way the Gen 3 tech stack is with Bluetooth Low Energy, the app is responsible for asking the strap for data.

And so if you kill the whoop app, force quit it on the Apple device, you're actually telling the operating system iOS of the iPhone, hey, I don't want this app running anymore. Please don't do anything. And so if you force kill it, it won't do anything, including asking the woop strap for data, even if the woop strap's like, hey, I'm here. I have some data. Do you want it? The iOS, the operating system isn't allowing the Woop app to run if you force quit it. And by the way, this is something that we at WUP actually don't control, but obviously it's an implication that goes along with the fact that we've transitioned to Bluetooth low energy. And just emphasize if you leave the WUP app open in the background, it should be fine. Yep, yep. And the data should keep sending. Yes, yes, correct. And we do see that in the field, actually.

A lot of times when you send in the support logs, we're able to see different cases for why you may be having the data lag. and one of the biggest things that we can offer to help immediately and it's something you can implement right now is just don't force, quit the WOOP app unless you really don't want it to run anymore. And I think a concern a lot of people have is if you leave your app running in the background,

isn't it going to totally drain my iPhone's battery or consume data? And actually, Apple and the iOS system is so optimized to have programs and processes running in the background that it's probably arguably almost as if not more power efficient

to let iOS handle apps that you want to use again in the future than to swipe up and kill them. So Apple, for all the developers out there, has a bunch of rules for what your app can and cannot do in the background. One of, I think, only seven things that can do in the background

is talk to a Bluetooth flow energy accessory. Oh, wow. And so it's not like it's just going crazy in the background, taking up all your battery life and stuff like that. You really shouldn't see any impact at all from leaving the WOOP app open. Of course, it's going to be a slight impact. You are asking it to transmit data,

send it up to our servers, process it, things like that. So there will be a slight impact, but I think, at least on my iPhone, it's about 3% of my total battery usage is from the WUP app. Yeah, and there's a few really important points that you just highlighted. One is, if you kill the app, you can't send data through. Yep. The other is iOS is actually pretty good at controlling that. Although we did learn through the process of, of, uh, of support logs that there are situations where iOS will actually kill the WOOP app. Correct. So there's, once again, because iOS is so optimized and so concerned about users and battery life and things like that and the experience that users will have with their iPhones,

they are very controlling and saying, hey, your app's in the background and the user of the iPhone is using a different app or some system is trying to update it in a different way. It may say, hey, all my background apps, I can't have you in the background anymore because I need the system resources to work on this other problem. And then iOS has the authority, and we don't have any say in it, to kill or terminate our app in the background. However, this is one of the new things with Gen 3 and one of the things we're working on and improving here at WOOP. The latest version of the iOS app that I released 2.0.5 has a lot of these improvements in it. And so we hope people notice quite a substantial improvement in their data lag if they were having issues before.

Yeah, I think that's critical to emphasize. It's like these things are all getting improved in real time every day. Keep updating your app. Keep updating your firmware's because that's just the latest and greatest stuff. And it goes along with being a member. We feel an obligation to make sure that your technology is evolving and getting better every day. Yep. Yep, definitely.

Constant improvement. I like to say that all the time. You know, and we at whoop say it all the time, use the things. data, monitor it, measure it, and then improve it. Yeah. And that's exactly what we're doing across the organization, and specifically on the software and hardware teams, making sure that Gen 3 today is 10x what it was yesterday. And we're working literally around the clock to make sure that happens.

And the feedback we get from users, especially with the support logs attached to diagnostic logs, really help us understand in the field, in the field what the real world use cases of the Woop are. Now, what are we doing around connectivity? Because I know that's something that a few users have said they've had issues with making sure that their Gen 3 stays paired to the app. Yep. So interestingly, Bluetooth Flow Energy is probably way more user-friendly, at least in my opinion, to connect with. So unfortunately, with the launch of Gen 3, after the launch, we discovered a defect in one of the electronic components in the Gen 3,

which was confirmed by the manufacturer of this electronic component. And the nature of the defect led some straps, not even close to the majority of straps, but some straps that when a specific command was issued within the strap itself, it would cause a strap to reboot. When the strap reboots, just like your computer or your iPhone, it kind of terminates all the different connections, and then when it comes back up,

sometimes it would restore those connections, but sometimes not because of the nature of this defect. it wasn't exactly reproducible or really like sensical the way that it happens and so that's unfortunate and that was causing a lot of the the gen three connectivity issues so if you can't connect your gen three to your iOS there's three things to check one it's that if you have this issue one is double tap the strap and you should always see the white battery lights shine and indicating what the battery life of your whoop strap is the second is is if you take the Gen 3 off your wrist and triple double tap it, it should enter pairing mode,

which you'll see white lights flashing in succession kind of up and down the whoop strap, and that's saying, hey, I'm ready to pair with a new device. And just to define a triple double tap, that you pretty much just take it off your wrist and tap it a bunch. Yes. And it'll do this pairing mode. Yeah, the specific, the reason why we say that is the accelerometer specifically looking for three double taps in quick succession.

Sometimes it's much easier just to tap it for about five to ten seconds and randomly in there you'll have triple double set there. And that'll turn on pairing mode and within its pairing mode you'll be able to bond to new devices. Okay. And then if you can't get these different things to work

and you notice that actually at no point in time did you see the green lights underneath the green LEDs underneath your whoop strap turn on? There's a chance that this electronic defect that we mentioned may be affecting your strap and that would be a great time to contact our support team and we'll take a deeper look at it and make sure you get a new strap if that's the case yeah and just to summarize the electrical defect this is something that we've

seen in a percentage of percentage of units so we're talking very small numbers in the in the grand scheme of things but for the people who this has happened to it's a fucking really lousy experience and we yeah and we feel really badly about that and so if there's any chance chance that you have this you email support you do that in the app right yep uh and that sends the support logs through our support team is working around the clock we've hired more support team we'll talk about support in a second and uh and they'll swap the unit out no question i mean it's uh it's our responsibility to make sure you've got technology that's working definitely well and one thing i'll say is we know how frustrating definitely this experience is and we're really sorry that this happened

The one thing, when you do contact support, we may ask you to run through a couple of steps before we issue this replacement. And it's not that we don't believe you or anything like that. It's just by going through these standardized procedures that our engineers have defined, enables us to better understand and categorize the error how it happens and allows us to get more data to fix it. And so please, you know, we'll respond as quickly as we can. Follow those steps. We'll confirm it. If it is this issue, we'll replace it. No questions asked.

and then we'll also have the additional data to make sure we can make sure it doesn't happen ever again. Yeah, and I mean, we talked about support there briefly. You've been spending an enormous amount of time actually responding to customers. If you're listening to this, there's maybe a chance you've interacted with CAPA over support. Talk about what that experience has been like and, you know, what you think the role of membership services is at WOOP? Yeah, definitely. It's been so rewarding and honestly really great for me to be on the front lines of customer support. seeing firsthand the feedback, complaints, and praises of the different WOOP users and their different

experiences from an enormous user base has not only given me more data to help better understand what our product roadmap should be, what things we need to address now, what new features people would like to see, what the impact of different bugs are and things like that. But it's also really rewarding, you know, seven years in with WOOP and now an enormous population and seeing the impact that people are experiencing from monitoring these things about their body. Yeah. That's super, it's really interesting. It's cool, right?

Yeah, yeah, it's really cool. And I definitely, you know, it makes the frustration that you can imagine abstractly as an engineer that these issues could cause, right? It makes it much more real, and I'm able to communicate that to our team much better. And it's kind of, it's been a great experience. And from it, I've created a real. roadmap of different things that we're going to address in the Gen 3, some different process changes within our engineering organizations to help ensure better quality moving forward and quicker communication and response times. And this is within, you mean when you say

response time, you're actually talking about within membership services. Yeah, sorry, sorry. So within the engineering organization, there's some process changes for how the feedback from the customers gets integrated into the engineering. I think, actually, let me back up a second here. something the WOOP community should know is that we take our customers in the highest regards. And all feedback that they send in for the history of WOOP has been relayed to engineers, whether it's in weekly meetings, direct communication over Slack and email. And engineers every day interact, if not with the customer directly, with the customer's direct feedback, direct words every day.

And that's, we make decisions based off that. We may directly solve someone's problem or alter plans or change code. but we do look at that every day and so that process and by the way we're doing this podcast because people were like hey you guys should do a podcast to talk about gen 3 so here we are exactly and so that's that's something we hold in high regards here at whoop and so that process there's some things that we can do internally to improve that but then also on the customer support side now that we have such an enormous population of people using whoop and it is a membership and part of the membership is great customer service and you know just one shout out to our customer service team has been doing an amazing amazing job there's been working work here on the clock. And look, to anyone who's complained because it's taken a few days to get back to, we're sorry. Like, frankly, we're really sorry. The number of things that we get from our users on a daily basis, even just to review their data and answer questions about their data. I mean, I think it's awesome that people want to know more. And by the way, we view it as part of your membership. That's where you're paying a subscription for us to have access to us and for us to be

able to really help you understand your data. Definitely, definitely. And I think along with that volume and increased number of users and just, you know, breadth of different things being asked over support, there needs to be some changes in both the technology that we use internally to address support tickets and different processes there that will implement very quickly and the whole team's on board for this, but it'll help us to respond quicker to the customer feedback. Yeah, I mean, one thing, one takeaway for me is just seeing how happy people, people get when they have a great support response and how angry people get when they have to wait a few days i mean i'm an impatient person myself so i get it and the reality and just

for everyone listening is we're ramping up our membership services team we're going to have way more representatives and our goal is for have every uh every question that's asked if we've responded to within a number of hours like that almost immediately if if possible so we're building that team up to make that possible. Yeah and the most important thing to realize is we don't delete any requests to come in or not answer it. We're going through literally in order in our ticketing system and we will answer every single question. There's no doubt about it. And we aren't speeding through these tickets. Obviously, we have a sense of urgency to get through them, but we're making sure every interaction we have is a positive interaction and is addressing the complaint fully. Yeah. And again,

we really appreciate these interactions. Yeah. Like we learned from them, the technology. gets better. Hopefully your experience gets a lot better. Definitely. And a slightly technical thing, right? It's important that people do this via the WOOP app. Especially if it's a technical issue, right? You might have a question on your membership or different things like that. But if it's a technical issue, it's almost a requirement, I would say, to do it via the Woop app. So if you go into the Woop app in the menu, go to the help section, then click email support. What that does is actually attaches a diagnostic log to that email thread. And that contains tons of information. for not only how the app's working

and different things that may not be working with the app, but also it contains diagnostic information from the strap side as well. Right. And so if it's a real technical issue that goes to engineering or something like that,

almost the first thing will ask the support agent to do is get your support log if it's not sent in already. So please, if you have a technical issue, to expedite the response time, send it in via this process in the app to get the support log

automatically attached. Well, look, I've been super impressed is always with the way you've handled this. So for everyone listening, we're on it. The product keeps getting better, and we love all of our users, all of our members. Thanks for all the feedback.

I want to transition now, Capo, to talk about some of the exciting stuff going on in the world of validation. You and I both believe that giving back to the medical community is part of our responsibility in being a well-funded technology startup. And it also is something that helps drive our technology forward.

So I'm looking right now at a study in front of me. It's called Sleep Patterns and Autonomic Function and Patients at Risk for Alzheimer's Disease may be used to predict cognitive performance. So this is a study in the Wheel Cornell Medicine Journal, and it's on Alzheimer's, and Woop was monitoring 33 patients. So tell me about the study that's recently come out. Yeah, definitely.

I think just adding more to the background of research at Woop real quick, My background is, I had a brief stint in research while I was in college and my father is a professor. And so research and science is something I hold very close to my heart and that I love. Yeah, I've always loved that. And so we really do support all kinds of different science initiatives here at Woop. And I'm really glad to see the rigor that we apply to everything. And so this specific study was one done at Cornell. And the question was, can you use where?

wearables to monitor sleep well enough that it could help potentially at people at risk for Alzheimer's disease. And the potential help, of course, is not from the monitoring, but it's from just having data so doctors can know and then take therapeutic responses. And the study was done with the group of, yeah, I believe 33 patients that were selected based on their likelihood of having Alzheimer's disease or developing Alzheimer's disease. And they wore whoop. It was a simple study. There was an additional part of the study where they also

assess cognitive performance and executive function and correlated with the biometric measures, which was really interesting. But I think the biggest thing for WOOP that they concluded was, hey, you know, Woop did show these changes in the architecture of their sleep, which is

what we refer to as how the sleep is broken down into slowly sleep, REM sleep, light sleep, disturbance as awakenings. Yep. And it was able to split the population between people that had a family history of Alzheimer's disease and people likely to develop Alzheimer's disease from those who didn't.

And that was all done using loop data. Yeah, it's pretty amazing, man. I mean, both my grandparents on my mother's side died with Alzheimer's. And so for me, this was like pretty close to the heart just to be part of a study on Alzheimer's and to think that, you know, maybe measuring sleep can play a huge role in improving diagnosis and help. Yeah, there's, you know, the brain plays such a large role and, well, obviously, in sleep and exactly what your body's doing that, and it's the key organ and the Alzheimer's disease.

And so it's natural to think that there should be some, you know, very early warning signs that you, if you can monitor early enough, maybe it changes the course of the disease for people. So it's definitely an interesting area of research. And by the way, if you're listening to this and you're thinking to yourself, oh, I'm involved in health initiative blank or this research initiative. We literally get emails every day asking about, hey, can we be used in this study or that? Obviously, a lot of this isn't published yet, and then these things are happening in the background. But we want to hear from you. We think doing this is really important.

It's really interesting. We love working close with the medical community. So reach out to us. Okay. Now I'm looking at a study. This came out very recently. Cloud-based evolution of wearable-derived sleep data in insomnia trials. Yeah, this was done at the University of Arizona.

And it was a really interesting study was, obviously, insomnia is a very large problem and a very frustrating problem for a lot of people. Totally. And it will affect tremendous parts of your life. And the official medical way of diagnosing sleep issues is through a very important. sleep lab and a polysomnia graph PSG and it's honestly not a pleasant experience we actually do a lot of studies here at whoop where we're developing our algorithms and send people to the sleep lab they wear a bunch of whoops drafts we get

those data together and correlate it and so it's not really a seamless experience at all and so what these researchers are wondering is hey can wearables and in this case whoop be used in helping people that have insomnia once again by monitoring either changes or monitoring that they have something like that And so that's what the study set out to do, was they had a cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia that was developed, and they wanted to see the impact of this on people, but they didn't want to have these people go to the sleep lab where they're probably sleep worse anyways and they already have insomnia, so it kind of interfered the data. They're like, can we just have them where WOOP, we get the sleep data, and then we can evaluate what's going on with the cognitive behavioral therapy. and what we saw in the study was that WOOP was able to reflect the improvement in their sleep as measured they developed a index for tracking how severe their insomnia was and they were able to track improvements in this index so they slept they had less effects of the insomnia I guess their sleep was better all from WOOP data so it was really great to see one that the cognitive behavioral therapy worked and two that WOOP was able to reflect these

improvements in their sleep times, their sleep efficiency, their wake after sleep onset decreased, and the total actual hours of sleep as well increased. Yeah, I mean, one thing that I think is fascinating is like, you know, you and I know this pretty well, but like if you have any kind of sleep issue or you want to know more about your sleep capabilities, you literally go to a sleep lab and you get hooked up to a PSG machine. The PSG machine has all these ridiculous nodes. it's like attached to every area of your body uh i've done them you've done them just you know for background and it's like a miserable sleeping environment yeah so if you have insomnia and you have to

get connected to 25 technical things right like it's not going to go well for you no yeah and and so uh the idea that whoop can be used to replace the PSG machine to be able to understand uh how to treat insomnia or other sleep conditions i mean i think that's pretty fucking awesome no it's really great and that you actually make a great point a lot of studies done today when they try to do anything at a sleep lab they actually have the participant in the study go to the sleep lab twice and throw out the first night of data because it's such a bad experience sleeping there and they'll only take the second night and that's you know that's just the state of the research world right now and i think new technologies are coming out like whoop that are able to improve this experience that will only lead to to better research and you know one day to disease prevention and cures and things like that yeah the conclusion of the This study reads, future studies should explore the capabilities of this sleep wearable, that's whoop, within a larger and healthy population. I mean, pretty amazing, ma'am. You know, we went from having something in a prototype in the Harvard Innovation Lab to now

having whoop being recommended for larger and more important populations of sleep monitoring. Yeah, I think it all goes back to something I know me and you are both very excited about is this fundamental idea that we had seven years ago that people should fundamentally just know what their heart rate is at every second of the day. They should know what heart rate variability is. They should know how they sleep. It's 2019 and really not everyone does. Like very few people actually do. Yeah, the grants hearing things. No one knows. And you know, I say this a lot, but you compare it to our cloud servers that we have. I think we have like 5,000 metrics generated every second on every server that we have and it's just an enormous amount of data and at the end of the day you know it's a business

obviously is valuable but it's nowhere near as valuable as my body and my health yeah and we just have this data discrepancy and it's really cool to see woo playing you know a role in this no it's amazing man well we'll uh we'll have uh capo back on the woo podcast soon probably to talk more about uh i don't know everything well we could talk about anything but but maybe founding the company and everything else but uh uh thanks for coming on and we'll come out with more validation We'll come out with more feedback from customers and keep going. That's fun. Thanks. If you're not already a whoop member, you can join our community for as low as $30 to begin.

We provide you with 24-7 access to your biometric data, as well as analytics across strain, sleep, recovery, heart rate variability, and more. The membership comes with a free whoop strap 3.0. We offer 6, 12, and 18-month memberships. The more you sign up for, the more you save. If you enter the code Will Ahmed at checkout, that's W-I-L-L-A-H-M-E-D, will give you $30 off a membership, just for listening to this podcast. For our European customers, the code is Will Ahmed E-U, and that will give you 30 euros off when you join. And for our current members, you can upgrade to the Woop Strap 3.0 and get access to all the new Woop Live features by following the link in your Woop app. If you're out of contract, you'll literally get the 3.0 for free when you commit to another six months.

Check out Woop.com slash The Locker for show notes and more, including links to relevant topics from this conversation and others. Make sure to subscribe, rate, and review the Woop podcast on iTunes, Google, Spotify, or wherever. You like to listen. We'd love to hear your feedback. You can find me online at Will Ahmed. I try to respond to everyone who reaches out. And you can also follow at Whoop on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. You can email The Locker at Whoop.com with any thoughts, ideas, or suggestions you may have.

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