Christine Lemke on Evidation’s Push to Use Wearables in Healthcare

This week Harry catches up with Christine Lemke from Evidation Health, a startup in San Mateo, CA, that helps drug developers and other organizations analyze the effectiveness of smart devices and wearables in new types of therapies. Lemke is Evidation’s co-CEO.

Our Fitbits and Apple Watches are with us so much of the time that the data they collect can go way beyond telling us whether we’ve completed our 10,000 steps for the day. They can also help doctors diagnose cardiovascular problems, and even provide early signs of cognitive changes like the onset of dementia. But the data comes in so many forms from so many sources that it’s a real chore to set up population-wide studies and keep the incoming data organized and anonymized. That’s Evidation’s specialty.

The company came together in its current form when a company Lemke helped to start, The Activity Exchange, merged with another company called Evidation. (Harry helped to incubate Evidation at GE Ventures with colleagues Rowan Chapman and Deborah Kilpatrick.) In its early years, Evidation focused simply on helping other companies prove that real-life data from consumer wearables was reliable enough to be useful in health decisions. But nowadays Evidation works mostly with Big Tech and Big Pharma companies like Eli Lilly, Johnson & Johnson, and Apple to test specific ideas, like whether data from people’s smartwatches and smartphones can help predict cardiovascular disease or cognitive decline early enough to help slow or reverse the conditions with new drugs.

In July 2020 Evidation raised $45 million in Series D funding to expand its so-called Achievement platform, which includes a network of nearly 4 million people who’ve agreed to share at-home sensor data and other health records. In September Lemke became co-CEO alongside Deb Kilpatrick. Before joining Evidation, she was co-founder and COO of Sense Networks, a machine learning platform for mobile activity data. And before that she worked at Microsoft, helping to manage the Xbox hardware engineering group.

You can find more details about this episode, as well as the entire run of MoneyBall Medicine’s 50+ episodes, at https://glorikian.com/moneyball-medicine-podcast/

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