“Technology Helps Scale Human Effort, Intuition, And Skill,” Says Gaurav Bhalotia, Founder, FindMyHealth

FindMyHealth is a preventive healthcare platform that could be very useful in looking after oneself especially during this lockdown.

A lockdown may have definitely downed some spirits but each one of us can use it to our highest advantage. ‘Self care’ would be a suggestion most people are recommending and they are absolutely right. In a fast-paced life, we often tend to overlook small signs our body gives us to slow down. 

FindMyHealth is a preventive healthcare platform that could help you understand your inner health based on an Ayurvedic framework. The platform identifies your healthiness scale and suggests dietary alterations for better health. The Founder, Gaurav Bhalotia addresses the startup as, “a scorecard for one’s inner health and their personalized supplement buddy.”

Gaurav Bhalotia, Founder, FindMyHealth

A graduate from IIT- Bombay, and University of California Berkeley, Gaurav is an expert in information retrieval, personalisation and building large scale systems. He is passionate about holistic health and traditional Indian Health Sciences and Medicine. He has filed multiple patents and has several conference publications in Search, Categorization and Information Extraction.

Express Computer’s Radhika Udas gets into an exclusive conversation with Gaurav Bhalotia, Founder of FindMyHealth, about how the platform is useful during a pandemic.

Kindly brief us about FindMyHealth and how it could be particularly helpful in the current pandemic the world is facing?

FindMyHealth, our first offering allows users to get a peek into their inner health, based on an Ayurvedic framework of what health is. It starts with a face selfie analysis to identify the body constitution and visual aging/obesity, which is followed up by a conversation with our AI doctor to identify the state of the inner functional health. 

This together is used to generate a detailed health fingerprint of the user and identify recommendations for herbs, foods and a healthy lifestyle. We also offer a personalized supplement, which compounds all the recommended herbs into a single pill for supporting health and recovery.

We have a couple of offerings for the current pandemic. The first one is ‘Corona Risk Calculator’ which is a quick self-assessment online test, driven by #AI to know your current risk level for Corona. The calculator evaluates symptoms, exposure and WHO data for observed mortality. It is based on the data and guidelines released by the CDC/WHO. The main concept behind this is to be a first point of triaging, helping users address their anxiety regarding corona infection. For borderline and high risk we plan to connect users to the nearest helpline number and also offer a free call back for high-risk users who opt for this service. Callback allows a medical professional to immediately talk to them and suggest appropriate actions.

Our second offering is an Ayurvedic Immunity Booster which can be taken by Individuals with low Immunity score (This is a part of our AI-driven inner health analysis). The booster is a combination of eleven specifically identified herbs that regulate immunity, which is our primary defense against any bacteria or virus.

What is the exclusiveness of your startup that differentiates it from big market players?

Personalisation is the distinctive benefit of our AI, enabling us to identify the unique health situation of an individual and connect them to appropriate targeted actions drawn from the wisdom of Ayurveda and other natural techniques. The additional strong aspect of our technology is that it can be done in a non-invasive manner and remotely on the app.

What kind of technologies are you using at FindMyHealth?

FindMyHealth App

We use deep learning-based computer vision algorithms for our selfie analysis and video analysis algorithms that are still in the experimental stage. We have multiple prediction engines built for images.

We also take the relevant knowledge from Ayurvedic texts and represent them in a multi-dimensional inference network. This is used by our recommendation engine, which is able to connect health analysis to herb, food and lifestyle recommendations.

We have designed a conversational state machine that can contextually execute actions and act on events. It’s a mini conversion engine with an extendable capability

We use microservices architecture, with services deployed on Azure cloud extensively using the available platform services for compute, storage, caching and load balancing. Broadly we use a mix of Kotlin, Python, and node.js for our backend and reactJS for the frontend. 

All our deployments are dockerized and sit behind a continuous deployment pipeline. We use cutting edge front-end features and best practices like server-side rendering to deliver performant applications. Another example is the offline-first approach for our doctor app which allows our applications to work in slow, unreliable network scenarios.

We use Postgres as DB and with kotlin, we use exposed ORM which is customized to support complex psql types. We love meta-programming and use it to reduce verbose code.

How important do you think it is for people to rely on technology? Are there any major follies per se?

Technology today enables us to lead a healthy, efficient and enriched life. It is in our lives everywhere from our daily entertainment to the food we eat and even the air we breathe. Technology is great at scaling, doing repetitive tasks, predictions making sense of large amounts of data and so on. Good technology is non-intrusive, hidden in the background, good technology is built to handle error scenarios. 

Technology helps scale human effort, intuition, and skill; which leads to its biggest folly ‘power’. Technology gives us more power, higher power demands higher responsibility. Good technology needs to have safety, privacy, security and ethics built-in, not as an afterthought but as an integral part of the technology itself.

From a financial perspective, are you a bootstrapped venture? If not, kindly elucidate the nature and amount of funding.

We closed our angel round in July last year for an undisclosed amount. The team is focussing on fine-tuning the technology and monetization model before raising additional funds. 

What are your immediate and long term milestones like?

Our immediate milestone is to get to 10000 users per month on the site. In the Long term, we want to be the platform for personalized Ayurveda – starting from deep assessment to technology products that support individuals’ journey back to balance and good health. We are working on personalized diet plans driven off our AI, which will be Ayurveda compliant. Diet is a significant part of who we are and diet corrections can have a huge impact on healing and recovery. 

We are also building a symptom checker based on Ayurvedic theory, which will also give us an idea of disease progression. Finally, we will be enabling ways for individuals to quickly get connected to Ayurvedic advice over chat and 

Lastly, any word of advice for budding entrepreneurs?

Work on problems you are passionate about and find good people who are equally passionate about your vision to work with. Believe in yourself, there will be constant ups and downs. Talk to your customers early, they are the only ones who can tell you what’ll work and what’ll not.

Execution is way more important than idea. Measure, learn and improve is the key to great execution.

applicationsCovid-19FindMyHealth
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