The Rise of Digital Therapeutics

In recent months, we have been seeing the rise of the term digital therapeutics. Digital therapeutics promise to help millions of people with cost-effective, accessible solutions that seem to be mostly powered by health apps versus medicine. The space is moving very quickly ... in just the last few days, we recently saw a major US insurance company willing to reimburse customers for these health apps in a similar way as they cover medicine.

There are applications for sleep, mental health, PTSD and even Parkinson's on the horizon.

Many digital therapeutic companies are using evidence-based research to understand and continuously improve the efficacy of their programs. These applications are also able to iterate much faster than pill-based solutions.

This news of digital therapies is in a similar realm of doctor's prescribing walks in the park. The initiative known as Park Rx America is led by Dr. Beth Peter of Lakewood Family Medicine in Holland, Michigan. In April 2019 a study was conducted by University of Michigan researchers suggested that 20 minutes of physical activity outside can reduce health issues such as stress, heart disease, blood pressure and weight. Many people have referred to this treatment as a nature-pill. 

This is (mostly) good news for humanity. Instead of relying on traditional pill-based prescriptions these therapies can provide more natural, behavioral treatments and possibly even help guide future preventative care and education. 

How does Bowhead fit into Digital Therapeutics

For the last couple years our team has been developing immutable and secure records for people to use our Bowhead Healthy Habits App and also Bowhead's GenomeBuddy. 

Over 10,000 people have created accounts on Bowhead and we have made significant improvements to Bowhead's blockchain and our general understanding of how this technology works and the benefits we can offer people around the world. 

As these digital therapies become more prevalent we see a growing need to secure more health data and provide homomorphic encryption which allows technology companies the capabilities to implement deep learning and machine learning processes without exposing secure health data. 

Bowhead Health's Development Roadmap

Complete Bowhead's researcher dashboard 

The Researcher dashboard will allow researchers and industry partners to purchase health data that has been anonymized. This is a big step for us as it showcases the true power of Bowhead's blockchain.

The researchers dashboard is in development and the estimated launch date is Q3 2019. 

Publish Bowhead's latest app update with redesign

Bowhead is undergoing a full redesign and we expect it to be implemented by the end of August 2019:

• Bowhead's new app will contain several additional security features as we prepare to launch the ecosystem with paid anonymized health data contributions to 3rd parties. Initially, we will be targeting our marketing to acquire the users who may be of potential interest to researchers. 
• The new Bowhead app will have a card-based view versus a cycle-view which allows us to embed more relevant information and create additional cards depending on the user groups.
• The new app also contains a researcher module which matches target users to researcher queries. We expect these new research modules to also increase the rewards people earn for contributing health data. 
• Status: In development. Alpha Android released. iOS and Android launching Q3 2019. 

Establish more research and industry partnerships

• Several corporate development activities in the pipeline. Submitted to 2 accelerators run by leading global healthcare companies. Bowhead made it the 2nd stage in one accelerator and waiting on the other. We will release the names once we have been accepted. 
• Status: Ongoing

Develop corporate partnerships for medical adherence device

• Bowhead is focusing on corporate development partners and the $300B medication adherence space to launch the Bowhead dispenser. We believe the focus on medication/nutraceutical focus is a more efficient use of our time and focus versus launching with solely a nutraceutical dispensing device. 

• We have instructed Indiegogo to return the Indiegogo backers funds and will aggressively pursue corporate partnerships with pharmaceutical and nutraceutical manufacturers to take this product to market. 
• Status: Ongoing

Release Point of Care Wellness Beta Test

• Bowhead continues to work with our lab partner in San Diego to develop a wellness cortisol test that is a point of care cartridge. 
• Bowhead has ordered the reagents and done some preliminary prototypes of cartridges. 
• The concept is that users will place a saliva sample on a small accessible (~$10) plastic cartridge which contains lateral flow assay technology that will indicate a cortisol level. 
• We currently have an alpha iOS app that uses machine vision to determine an approximate "level" of cortisol. 

This will be marketed as a wellness device while filing to receive FDA approval. Although we intend to market this as a wellness device we plan to conduct a science-based study to determine the efficacy of this wellness device.

Token Utility

We are operating in a relatively new and quickly changing space. When we initially started platform development, the Waves platform promised Smart Contracts. The timeline to deploy Smart Contracts was not met. As a result, we switched our development and token to Ethereum, as it was (and is) the clear leader in Smart Contract infrastructure. Unfortunately, due to our business model of micro-transaction rewards for health data it made it cost prohibitive to stay on Ethereum's mainnet. We leveraged Ethereum's smart contract platform to launch Bowhead's blockchain. 

You can read our R&D blog post from March 2018 in detail regarding the subject. 

All this to say, we plan to finalize the tokenswap this year to Bowhead's mainnet while adding more capabilities to the Bowhead wallet to support added utility.  

Upcoming Release to Bowhead's Android App

If you are an Android user: Please help us beta test the new design and give us feedback. Send an email to support@bowheadhealth.com and we will add you as a tester.