Meet Thea, Your New AI Health & Longevity Companion 😸

6 min readJan 13, 2024

Introducing TheaAI

It’s been a while since I wrote. I have been busy working on my new health app TheaAI built for normal people who struggle to take healthy actions every day. If this sounds like you, sign up to the waitlist.

Most data driven health apps have data driven interfaces. Ordinary users struggle to understand these metrics and often feel overwhelmed by the lack of intuitive and easy to understand insights 😣

Here are some reviews of ubiquitous health apps which shows the frustration of “regular, non-health obsessed” people 😱

“I am not a huge stats person. Lots of graphs and stats overstimulate me and give me a headache.”

“I practice intuitive eating and HAES, which means that I explicitly focus on how movement helps my body rather than on calorie burn etc. This is great, but it also means I gave up my usual super motivating factors to exercise such as closing my Apple Watch rings.”

“To say I’m shocked at how bad this app is, would be an understatement. It’s overly complex, unattractive, and poorly thought out.”

This results in ordinary people struggling to prioritize health because:

They don’t know how
It’s not fun and interesting
It doesn’t meet them where they are i.e. a lack of personalization.

TheaAI is designed to be fun and appealing to regular users by meeting them where they are on their health journey. Thea uses the concept of fun, personalized health avatars, AI chat, and a dynamic widget to convince users to take small, healthier actions every day 👯

Thea aims to make the fun from getting healthy > effort to get healthy 🙌

Thea will help people get across the first longevity bridge

Over the last 5 years, I have been obsessed with human longevity. I have read popular and niche opinions on the topic, taken biology and computer science courses, listened to countless podcasts (my favourite on the topic is Peter Attia), and I am convinced that getting more people to live longer, healthier lives is a crucial step on the path to getting more people living exceptionally long life and healthspans 🤓

But while there are many apps and services catering to “athletes, bio-hackers, and extremely fit people” (Strava, Whoop, Wahoo, TrainerRoad, Gyroscope etc.), there aren’t many apps explaining and simplifying overall health for regular people. And we shouldn’t leave the majority of people behind in our quest for extreme health and longevity.

Using the “3 Bridges Approach to Longevity”, I see the vision of TheaAI as getting as many people as possible across the first bridge. To understand more about the 3 Bridges approach, read my post from 2020 titled Living to 100 and Beyond: The Quest for Immortality

This is the gap I see Thea addressing — making health and longevity fun, easy to understand, and actionable for non-health obsessed users 🧠

Relationships with pets are easy to build and therapeutic for most people. Especially when you can choose your own virtual pet, name it yourself, and make it healthier with your daily actions. Instead of seeing overwhelming graphs and charts, you get to learn about your health with an adorable pet who chats with you in a tone of voice you like and respond to 😻

For me, Thea has been transformational in many ways. I’ll give a concrete example.

For the longest time, I was convinced that my cholesterol levels rising was a result of my genes. However, my daily interactions with Thea pointed out that I was consuming over 30 grams of saturated fats every day. This blew my mind as I had always considered my diet to be somewhat healthy.

Now consider the impact of this revelation to someone who knows very little about nutrition and they just have to take photos of their SAD (Standard American Diet, can also be British 😅) diet and swap out ingredients to make it significantly better for them.

As they interact more, their pet teaches them progressively, combining insights, education, and actions with cognitive behavioural therapy to change their behaviour at a pace they are comfortable with.

This is how I imagine TheaAI changing the future of everyday health for regular people 🧡

Immediate Vision for Thea

Personalized health databases 👩‍💻

I am experimenting with personalized health databases for users. This would mean that all health data, unstructured chat data, and app interactions get stored as structured features and each user interaction (chat message, health data, and other actions like sharing etc.) actually improves the app for the users. A super feedback loop to take app personalization to the next level.

Curated knowledge base with semantic routing 📚

I am creating a very specific knowledge base with information on key health and longevity topics and a system to route user questions to the highly relevant pieces of information instead of relying on general LLM data. This will mean that the responses to user questions will be extremely high quality and tailored.

Hyper personalized, multi-modal, next-gen chat 💬

The personalized health database and curated knowledge base will make chat hyper personalized, not just with data and information but also with motivation strategies and tone of voice (I imagine my personalized tone of voice in the app to be factual with dry humour and occasional butt kicking). In addition to that, including multi-modality (vision for food tracking to improve the diet of casual users is the use case I am currently most excited about) and specific app features and components (goal cards, stickers, GIFs) will help us create a next-gen health chat for users.

Avatars and gamification 👯

Saving the best for last. Avatars allow a level of gamification previously unseen in health apps. Allowing users to take photos of their pets to generate their avatars, multi-user avatars, accessories unlocked by taking specific actions recommended by their avatars are some ways I imagine users interacting with their health through Thea.

Future Vision for Thea

In the long run, I see Thea as the primary health app used by billions of people worldwide 🚀

First port of call for all everyday health questions: Frequent users might have been growing their avatar (and contributing to their health database) for months or even years. Questions related to prior medication usage, health and diet evolution, seasonal depression and anxiety, test results will all be easily communicated, shared, and understood. And so will solutions that have worked in the past.
Bringing health and longevity to the masses: Thea will make billions of users aware of their health and the impact that they can have by taking micro-actions with little to none cognitive effort. For users who get more involved, there will be graduation products to support their enhanced health journey.
Sharing and using their own data: Users will be able to use their health data in ways previously not possible. Some use cases I imagine are:
Having informed conversations with their primary care physicians using Thea
Sharing their health data through Thea’s API with their insurance provider to get significantly better rates through better decisioning
Being able to understand, have a chat about, and purchase relevant health products in chat