Lumen Integrates With Apple Watch To Hack Metabolism

• Lumen, a metabolism measurement device, has launched a groundbreaking integration with Apple Watch
• It makes Lumen the only app on the Apple Watch store to measure and track a user’s metabolism, which can be aligned with exercise activity to improve health
• This month, Lumen also unveiled a new monthly cycle feature to help women manage their menstrual health
• “We want women to use data in a way that empowers them to make the right decisions for their health in the most personalised way,” CEO Daniel Tal Mor told Welltodo

TEL AVIV, Israel — Lumen, an app and device that monitors a user’s breath to track metabolism, has launched an integration with Apple Watch, signalling a new frontier for the future of health tracking and the evolving field of biohacking. 

The integration makes Lumen the only app on the Apple Watch store to measure and track metabolism. From 23rd August, all Lumen and Apple Watch users will be able to log their food, track their nutritional or fitness progress and receive metabolic health tracking results on their wrist in real time.

A similar recent partnership with Garmin watches, providing users with combined insights for their exercise and nutrition metrics, saw Lumen users exercise 15% more than their base.

With metabolism data becoming more accessible, CEO Daniel Tal Mor believes Lumen can play a central role in the future of health tracking, which could one day lead to predicting illnesses before they develop, or even preventing them entirely through sophisticated, personalised nutrition.

“With all the health pillars we track today such as our fitness and sleep, we need a north star to make sense of all that information we get in real-time,” Tal Mor told Welltodo.

“That’s where Lumen comes in. It’s no longer about ‘How long was my run?’ or ‘How many steps?’. It’s rather about ‘How does this impact my metabolism, and ‘what should I eat to optimise my fitness or sleep?’”

Predicting illness and preventing disease
Lumen was co-founded eight years ago by Michal and Merav Mor, twin sisters with PhDs in physiology, who conceived of the idea for a personal metabolic tracker to help them train for an Ironman endurance race.

Today’s Lumen device measures a user’s metabolism through the carbon dioxide in their breath. In under one minute, users can understand on a scale from one to five if they are burning fats or carbs as a fuel source, and use that information to adjust their food intake and exercise activity.

By making this information more accessible to users via partnerships with Garmin and Apple, Tal Mor expects the field of health tracking – or biohacking – will play an increasingly prominent role in corporate wellness and healthcare.

“The pandemic has revealed that investing in an employee’s health from home has proven to be beneficial,” he explained. “Companies will likely invest more and more in remote health and wellness, especially if it integrates into health data that people already tap into on a daily basis.”

Healthcare is another industry Tal Mor expects will come to rely on wellness and biohacking solutions as a preventative measure. “Prevention doesn’t always come from the healthcare system, it comes from the ground up, from the need upward,” he continued.

“What if we could predict your likelihood of having a serious disease? This is where personalised nutrition can strongly impact millions of people suffering from high blood pressure, obesity or heart disease,” he said.

“At Lumen we want to predict illness and also be able to help people move away from it through nutrition and by building healthy habits that last, not through a quick fix.”

Lumen release period cycle feature to empower women
With women’s health a key driver for the company’s co-founders, this month the Tel Aviv-based company also announced plans to release a new period tracking feature.

Along with an in-app guide, they hope it will empower users to adapt their nutrition to the various phases of their menstrual cycle.

“Women’s health has a huge potential to gain more momentum, especially with female entrepreneurship on the rise,” said Tal More.

“Women have different nutritional needs through every cycle phase, and it’s so important to acknowledge those different needs and create products or features that cater to them.”

The feature is designed to help users restore iron levels, curb feelings of fatigue, regulate blood sugar, improve sleep and keep energy levels elevated throughout the month.

Lumen isn’t the only health tracking device exploring innovative ways to hack the body in the hopes of predicting and preventing illness. Fitbit, Whoop, Oura Ring and several other gadgets have long since moved beyond simply counting steps to measuring brain activity, glucose levels and sleep quality.

In fact, recent research from Stanford University’s School of Medicine suggested data from smartwatches, such as alterations in heart rate, steps and sleep, could even be used to detect COVID-19 as early as nine days before symptoms develop.

Lumen’s Apple integration will be made available to all users later this month. Tal More revealed the company has plans to integrate with further wearables that can be accessed via the Google Play Store, “however not in the near future”.