Brief #1

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Welcome to the 26 new subscribers who have joined Future Human since our last edition! Join 292 other leaders learning about the future of human health by subscribing here:

TL;DR

1. Back from HLTH 2025 with 5 key healthtech trends we spotted in Las Vegas.

2. Future Human will be getting a fresh new format with two products:

   1. Weekly healthtech headline recap w/ team commentary

   2. Monthly startup deep dives alongside the CEOs/Founders we met at HLTH

3. Future Human LinkedIn will be posting 2x weekly on the lecture takeaways from HLTH

Hi friend,

Welcome back to Future Human! It has been a couple weeks since our last piece. As you know, we went to Las Vegas for HLTH 2025. In those 48 hours: we attended 18 lectures, interviewed 20 company executives, took 95 pages of notes, confirmed deep dive candidates through to 2027, and came away inspired by what teams are building for the patients of tomorrow. The experience and conversations were unbelievable!

With that said, we have now been digesting these notes and deciding how to best incorporate everything into insightful pieces both in long and short form. After some long discussions, we have decided to adjust the newsletter format to give you deeper dives and pertinent weekly news all in one publication. Essentially, Future Human will not be offering two products to its readers.

We have long been against the idea of just being another newsletter summarizing the headlines for the week without providing thoughtful commentary, so we will not become that. With that said, a lot of new readers from HLTH expressed interest in getting some news recap from us with our thoughts, so we will be launching a weekly healthtech headline email where the team and I will provide you 5 exciting stories from the week in healthtech with our commentary on each. I am thinking Tuesday for those and Friday for deep dives, but that may be adjusted.

The deep dives on the other hand, have now essentially been booked out into 2027, sparked by conversations we had with founders at HLTH. These dives, however, will take even more time. Founders/CEOs we now know personally want weeks to set up interviews, review drafts, have us try their products, and understandably make sure the piece is the best it can be. For that reason, we will be releasing in-depth deep dives monthly rather than weekly. Also, in full transparency, I am happy to take more time between 3,000 word dives as they take a lot of effort and I am about to enter my clinical year of medical school where I will be working in the hospital daily, leaving less time for writing.

HLTH 2025 gave us not only the inspiration to expand our newsletter offerings, but it also gave us incredible insights into the future of healthtech. We are turning the lecture notes into short form posts on LinkedIn from the Future Human page coming in two weeks. We are now also traveling to company sites to test their products (more to come for December’s deep dive). It is getting out of hand in the best way, so we needed these two weeks to figure out a plan ahead to turn all of this information into great reading for you, but there you have it: weekly headline recaps, monthly deep dives on insane startups, LinkedIn posts on lecture learnings from HLTH.

For our first weekly recap, we thought it would be awesome to tell you about the key healthtech trends we picked up from the 48 hours at HLTH. Chatting with startups competing in similar spaces, interviewing CEOs about the future of their field, and listening to speakers make their predictions can tell you a lot about what is to come. So please enjoy the Top 5 Trends in Healthtech from HLTH 2025 and look out for headlines next week and the next deep dive in December.

To more lives saved,

Andrew, Nicholas, and Isabelle

1. Clinical Trial Access - Andrew’s Take

Oprah was supposed to be the opener for HLTH 2025. A few weeks before the event, however, she was swapped for actor Rob Lowe. Scheduling conflict I imagine. In Rob’s opening chat with Jacob Van Naarden (President of Eli Lilly Oncology) and one of their amazing cancer patients, he harped on the need for improved trial access. I have heard the argument before from both patients and pharmaceutical companies, so I did not think much of it, but that was until I got to the floor of the convention and started chatting with founders.

For those who are less in the pharma space, a CRO (Contract Research Organization) is a company that helps therapeutic makers run clinical trials. Think of them as the project managers and operators who handle the logistics—finding sites, coordinating patients, collecting data, and making sure everything follows regulations. Pharma and biotech hire CROs so they can focus on the science while the CRO handles the complicated execution. With the advent of AI, social media marketing, and massive data stores, everyone thinks they can get you more patients signed up sooner and for less money.

Rob’s point in the opener was critical – only about 5% of Americans have ever joined a clinical trial. I can assure you a much larger proportion has a disease that could benefit from trying the newest product in development. Making people more aware of the option and linking them to the company developing the product most applicable to them is the debated step.

Just strolling the convention floor, I ran into GoodLab, which provides trial sponsors a massive segmented database of patients around the country. They demonstrated its power to me by letting me choose any rural region and disease to show the closest individuals they can contact to participate in such a trial. They target those who have never been a part of a trial through “untapped digital channels,” which I admittedly still need to investigate because what is that? If not Google/Facebook, then who? From there, I saw Medable, which offers a platform for decentralized and hybrid clinical trials. They are more operationally oriented, offering to speed up trial setup and improve efficiency with their cloud platform for easy data collection and integration. They even offer remote patient participation and international reach.

I think everyone can agree that getting the right people to the therapeutics they need is a worthwhile endeavor. Now it becomes a question of who has the largest rolodex to call these people up the fastest and cheapest. Let’s watch and see!

2. Contactless Vital Signs - Andrew’s Take

Mirrors, lamps, fridges? Soon every piece of furniture will be able to tell you your heart rate, blood pressure, and whether you may have a UTI or not. I was absolutely blown away at the number of teams I spoke with that were working on contactless vital measurement. Now, I have known about camera/pixel-based collection of vital data for quite some time now. That said, the accuracy was still shaky last I heard and teams were just looking to put the tech into Peloton bikes to measure user heart rate, not a patient setting. Now, I come to HLTH and people are strapping radar systems in prison cells to monitor inmate health 24/7 (Xandar Kardian) and offering stroke and heart attack risk after looking at your bathroom mirror for just 30 seconds (NuraLogix and FaceHeart).

My immediate thoughts are as follows: pixel-based analysis like in the case of those mirrors can allow for blood pressure measurement alongside heart rate and respiratory rate, but it does not allow for continuous monitoring given that nobody will stand in front of a mirror all day (I mean how full of yourself can you be?). On the radar end, that conversation with Xandar Kardian was one of my favorites as the tech quickly put most of my doubts to shame and answered my questions. The radar measures bodily micro-vibrations to track the vitals but also motion. This means you can track physical activity alongside the cardiac and respiratory information. Key point, the radar easily penetrates sheets so a ton of data can be collected while sleeping. The lack of skin pixel monitoring, however, means blood pressure is not measurable so it is not without its flaws.

We have deep dives planned next year with both Xandar and NuraLogix, where I will explore both more, but for now I feel that they are products achieving a similar goal but selling to a totally different group. As I mentioned earlier, Xandar is being implemented in prisons right now. A bit shocking to first read, but it makes perfect sense. We have an in need population restricted to a physical space while monitored by a historically understaffed team. Health issues are often ignored until glaringly obvious. Xandar serves as a 24/7 caretaker alerting teams to sudden changes to allow for rapid intervention. On the other hand, NuraLogix Corporation and FaceHeart could be either a consumer product or an in-office option for physicians looking to speed up patient encounters. The tech lends itself to clinical workflows where a patient needs their vitals checked, but it allows all of it to be done in 30 seconds. Having used the mirror product myself at HLTH, I still have questions about the accuracy of the published algorithms they used to calculate risk across a host of diseases, but that is what our deep dive is for. Until then, contactless vital measurement will remain an obsession of countless teams and I am similarly pumped about it.

3. Mental Health Tracking - Isabelle’s Take

A clear trend at HLTH was the push toward objective or semi-objective measures in mental health—biological signatures, passive digital markers, and multimodal models that go beyond traditional self-report. I spent some time at Creyos’ booth (separate from Andrew), and also spoke with Levie Hofstee, CEO of Neurocast.ai and inventor of Neurokeys. I also sat in on the LinusBio presentation on ClearStrand-ASD. Taken together, these companies all represent this focus on assessments and diagnostics for both emotional and cognitive health. 

Many people seem to be trying to solve the same problem: “how do you measure brain-behavior based conditions that historically have depended on subjective reporting and observation?” Creyos positions itself in this movement, but its actual value proposition is different: it consolidates a wide range of subjective neuropsych tests into a single digital platform. That standardization is useful, but it doesn’t fundamentally shift the field toward objective measurement, even if the branding gestures in that direction.

By contrast, Cognoa, who I did not speak with at HLTH but as you know, Andrew has written a deep dive on them and one of my longest professional mentors is the CEO Dr. Sharief Taraman, succeeds in blending subjective behavioral input and objective, data-driven pattern recognition trained on years of clinical cases.

On the other extreme is LinusBio. LinusBio is impressive on the technical side but extremely narrow, and raises the larger question of how far biology alone should reach into diagnoses like autism. These approaches highlight a tension the field hasn’t resolved: which conditions can be validated through biological signatures, which require behavioral context, and where hybrid models fit.

The most compelling examples to me right now are ones that are able to respect complexity while searching for digital biomarkers. Neurocast.ai’s passive measures through everyday phone typing (“neurokeys”) avoid friction and capture real-world behavior. I connected the CEO of Neurocast with Dr. Taraman at Cognoa because both companies use an approach of anchoring its AI models in real patient behavior, physician subjective expertise, and validated clinical data -- sidestepping the “biology-only” trap. The direction reminds me of work by Dr. Tiffany Ho (CANDY Lab at UCLA) and Dr. Nicholas Allen (founder of Ksana Health) that also uses naturalistic smartphone data in the TIGER EARs study to predict affective and cognitive states related to depression risk. That’s closer to where the field is heading: multimodal, unobtrusive, and clinically grounded.

If there was one lesson from HLTH, it’s that the race for “objectivity” in mental health is bumping up against its limits. The companies that stood out to me weren’t chasing purity; they were building hybrid systems that reflect how cognition and emotion actually work. The future isn’t biology-only or behavior-only. It’s layered, multimodal, and grounded in real-world data—precise enough to be actionable, and flexible enough to remain human.

4. Voice as a Biomarker - Andrew’s Take

This fourth point pulls together the contactless diagnostic trend in #2 and mental health tracking of #3. Long story short, people at HLTH are obsessed with voice.

Similar to the vital measurement teams, there were too many voice analyzing groups at HLTH for us to speak to them all. What was clear was that they each had their own arguments as to why their AI model was the best to track mental health states via patient voice recordings. This theory is not a new one. I actually worked with a team doing exactly this during college while in a healthtech incubator. Six years later and the algorithms are certainly improving but still not perfect.

We chatted with Thymia and Canary Speech on the floor. Thymia uses a multimodal AI model that combines voice (acoustics + language), video (facial micro-expressions, gaze, head movement), and behavior (interaction with gamified tasks) to objectively assess mental health. Canary Speech aims to achieve the same goal with just live or recorded vocal biomarkers (no video or games). Thymia is offering a wellness product to measure burnout and stress as well as an experimental diagnostic model for ADHD and anxiety. Canary Speech conversely offers their voice analysis to physicians for their clinical conversations to support decision making later on. They both sell to providers, payers, and employers as well as offer clinical trial use cases.

My initial take is that the possibilities are wonderful on paper, but I struggle to see a world in which a patient would prefer to speak into a camera to get a diagnosis rather than a human physician. I am not the first one to have this revolutionary take, hence the companies selling to physicians as an overlay on top of human-to-human interactions to assist in diagnosis later on. That is an intelligent approach. Even if the tech becomes perfect, I do not think psychiatry offices will become a bunch of booths with cameras for patients to chat with.

A lot of promise, but like with the vital sign algorithms, a lot of questions remain.

5. Women’s Health Expansion - Isabelle’s Take

The clearest takeaway from HLTH is that women’s health is no longer a specialty track—it’s becoming the backbone of how the industry thinks about mental health, chronic disease, caregiving, and primary care. Every session seemed to confirm the same thing: women’s health isn’t a vertical; it’s infrastructure.

That was obvious in “The Weight on Her Shoulders: Women’s Mental Health”: on the Ethos Stage, where Talkiary, Lyra, Kyndred, ProjectHeal, and Dr. Judith Joseph framed women’s mental health through the biopsychosocial load of invisible labor, trauma, autoimmune comorbidity, and unsupportive workplaces. Dr. Joseph’s “five V’s” (validation, venting, values, vitals, vision) grounded the discussion in evidence-based approaches to joy and resilience. As a woman, I really loved this inherently feminine approach -- leaning in joy and levity in a practical, actionable way to solve other issues in women’s mental health and health at large.

Caregiver Tech sessions like that with A Place for Mom, Abby Care, and Carrallel showed the same dynamic from another angle. I learned about how people are solving for the “sandwich generation”, those caught between caring for aging parents and raising children. This population is propping up two ends of the care system while tech (RPM, smart sensors, robotic assistants) tries to fill structural gaps that policy still ignores.

In “Women Are Not Octopuses”, Natural Cycles, Calla Lily Clinical Care, Respin Health, and Alloy argued for increased HRT access and menopausal/post-menopausal education. Female octopuses experience catastrophic health decline and death after laying eggs because of abrupt hormonal collapse. While women also experience extreme hormone shifts in late age, we deserve optimal health beyond childbirth and menopause.

And in “Care Beyond the Stirrups”, One Medical, Rhia Ventures, Tia, the Atria Institute, and Progyny highlighted the consequence of treating OB-GYNs as de-facto PCPs: women live 25% more of their lives in poor health because primary care rarely screens for the hormonal, metabolic, sleep, and pain issues that drive long-term disease. HLTH showed me that there is a much welcomed shift towards understanding women’s health as more than just reproductive health. Women’s health includes women-specific needs in sleep, nutrition, exercise, metabolism, and pain, beyond that relegated only to reproduction or aesthetics. 

Across all of these sessions, one pattern held: women’s health shows up everywhere because women’s health affects everything. HLTH reflected that. Finally, I believe this reflects a more broader shift in healthcare towards precision medicine. I love that. Just as each individual is unique and thus has different requirements to optimize health, this trend in women’s health reflects medicine that is finally taking into consideration the distinct needs that women have. I am excited for this as I believe this will serve our entire society at large.

We always appreciate feedback, questions, and conversation. Feel free to reach out on LinkedIn.