The Digital Health Podcast with Fexingo: Wearables, Diagnostics, and Health Software

Digital twins — virtual replicas of human organs, systems, or even entire bodies — are moving from engineering into medicine. In this episode, Lucas and Luna explore how Dassault Systèmes built a 3D heart model accurate enough to simulate surgical outcomes, and why cardiologists at Boston Children's Hospital are using it to plan complex procedures before entering the OR. They discuss the computati...

Episode 53 of The Digital Health Podcast explores the emerging field of digital therapeutics for chronic pain. Lucas and Luna examine how companies like Kaia Health and DarioHealth are using cognitive behavioral therapy, movement tracking, and biofeedback to manage conditions like back pain and fibromyalgia—often replacing or reducing opioid use. They discuss a randomized controlled trial showing...

Lucas and Luna explore how startups like Nabla and Abridge are deploying generative AI to automate clinical documentation, cutting physician note-taking time from hours to minutes. They examine the accuracy trade-offs, the integration challenges with existing EHR systems, and why this technology might actually reduce burnout rather than just add another tool. With specific examples from pilot prog...

Lucas and Luna explore how continuous glucose monitors are moving from a niche diabetes tool to a mainstream wellness device for athletes, biohackers, and the general public. They examine the science behind CGMs, the key players like Abbott and Dexcom, the controversy over using them without medical need, and what the data really shows about glucose variability in non-diabetics. Specific focus on...

Episode 50 of The Digital Health Podcast explores how life and health insurers are using data from wearables like smartwatches and fitness trackers to inform underwriting decisions. Lucas and Luna examine the case of John Hancock, which in 2018 became the first major US life insurer to offer interactive policies tied to wearable data through its Vitality program. They discuss how this shift from r...

Episode 49 of The Digital Health Podcast with Fexingo. Lucas and Luna explore the quietly growing market where health insurers pay for wearable device data — not through employer wellness programs, but via direct incentives, premium discounts, and data-sharing agreements. They break down the specific case of UnitedHealth's Motion program, which offers up to $1,000 per year in rewards for sharing s...

Episode 48 of The Digital Health Podcast explores how smartphone photos and computer vision are transforming skin cancer screening. Lucas and Luna break down the FDA-cleared AI from companies like SkinAnalytics and DermTech, the accuracy numbers from a 2025 JAMA Dermatology study, and why dermatologists are split between excitement and skepticism. They discuss how convolutional neural networks tra...

We all have health data now — smartwatches, HRV scores, sleep stages, step counts. But does any of it actually change what we do? In this episode, we drill into a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association that tracked 2,400 users across four consumer health platforms. The headline number: only 12 percent of users who received a clinically meaningful health insi...

In this episode of The Digital Health Podcast with Fexingo, Lucas and Luna explore how remote patient monitoring is transforming post-surgery recovery. They focus on the case of Hinge Health, which has expanded from musculoskeletal therapy to surgical recovery, using wearable sensors and a digital platform to track patients' progress after knee and hip replacements. The hosts discuss a recent stud...

Prescription digital therapeutics (PDTs) are a new category of software that doctors can prescribe to treat conditions from ADHD to substance use disorder. In this episode, Lucas and Luna explore how companies like Akili Interactive and Pear Therapeutics have navigated FDA clearance, insurance reimbursement, and the tricky transition from app store to pharmacy counter. They break down the numbers...

In this episode of The Digital Health Podcast, Lucas and Luna explore how voice biomarkers are being used to detect early signs of Alzheimer's disease. They dive into a groundbreaking study from the University of California, San Francisco, where researchers analyzed speech patterns from over 200 older adults and found that subtle changes in pitch, pauses, and word fluency can predict cognitive dec...

Nearly every major drug company is now weaving digital tools—wearables, smartphones, and connected sensors—directly into how they test new therapies. In this episode, Lucas and Luna look at why decentralized clinical trials have gone from pandemic workaround to permanent fixture, and what that means for both patients and the business of medicine. They walk through the story of Pfizer's Dora trial...

Lucas and Luna explore the emerging field of vocal biomarkers for mental health diagnosis. They dive into how AI-powered voice analysis can detect depression, anxiety, and PTSD by picking up subtle acoustic changes. The episode focuses on a real-world study from the University of Southern California where voice samples achieved 85% accuracy in diagnosing PTSD in military veterans. They discuss the...

Hypertension affects nearly half of US adults, yet most people only get their blood pressure checked during a doctor's visit. In this episode, Lucas and Luna explore how wearable blood pressure monitors — from cuff-based devices to optical sensors — are shifting hypertension management from occasional office readings to continuous, real-world data. They examine the technology behind Aktiia's optic...

Lucas and Luna explore the emerging field of vocal biomarker technology, where companies like Sonde Health and Vocalis Health analyze subtle changes in voice patterns to screen for conditions ranging from depression to COVID-19 and even Parkinson's disease. They break down how a 20-second voice sample can reveal physiological cues invisible to the naked eye, the regulatory pathway these devices ar...

Lucas and Luna explore the messy, high-stakes world of EHR integration for digital health platforms. They focus on a specific case: how a chronic care management startup called Rimidi built a direct bridge into Epic Systems, the dominant EHR used by over 250 million patients in the US. The hosts walk through the technical hurdles, the data-privacy landmines, and the business incentives that make o...

Episode 38 of The Digital Health Podcast explores the quiet rise of smart rings—wearables that pack sensors into a jewelry form factor. Lucas and Luna examine how Oura, Samsung, and startups like Circular are competing to track sleep, heart rate, and temperature without a wristband. They dig into the clinical research backing ring-based sleep staging, why insurers are starting to subsidize them fo...

In this episode of The Digital Health Podcast, Lucas and Luna explore the emerging world of wearable microneedle patches that deliver drugs through the skin without pain. They focus on the specific case of Zosano Pharma's transdermal patch for migraine, which failed in clinical trials in 2021, and contrast it with newer players like Vaxxas and LTS Lohmann that are targeting vaccines and insulin. L...

Lucas and Luna explore how a handful of digital health startups are rethinking the primary care visit from the ground up. The episode focuses on 'ambient listening' AI — software that listens to the patient-clinician conversation and automatically generates clinical notes, diagnoses, and billing codes in real time. They examine the specific case of Abridge, which recently partnered with several ma...

In episode 35 of The Digital Health Podcast, Lucas and Luna unpack the FDA's evolving framework for regulating software-as-a-medical-device (SaMD). They focus on the agency's 2025 guidance on AI/ML-enabled devices and how it affects startups like IDx and Caption Health. Lucas explains the 'predetermined change control plan'—a mechanism that lets algorithms update without full re-clearance. Luna qu...

Remote patient monitoring has moved beyond chronic disease management into mainstream primary care. Lucas and Luna examine a specific case: a midsize clinic network in Ohio that deployed cellular-connected blood pressure cuffs and pulse oximeters for 2,000 patients with hypertension. They discuss the early results — a 14 percent reduction in systolic blood pressure over six months — and the operat...

Episode 33 of The Digital Health Podcast with Fexingo explores how artificial intelligence is analyzing retinal scans to detect signs of diabetic retinopathy, cardiovascular disease, and even Alzheimer's risk years before symptoms appear. Lucas and Luna zero in on the FDA-cleared system from IDx-DR (now LumineticsCore) and the new wave of deep learning models trained on millions of fundus photogra...

Lucas and Luna explore how wearables like the Oura Ring and Apple Watch can detect early signs of viral infections before symptoms appear. They discuss the 2020 study from Stanford that showed temperature changes and heart rate variability shifts preceding COVID-19 symptoms by 2-3 days, and how companies like Fitbit are now building disease-detection algorithms. The hosts drill into the specific p...

Episode 31 of The Digital Health Podcast explores how Oura Ring pivoted from a niche sleep tracker to a corporate wellness platform used by employers like Cisco and Bank of America. Lucas and Luna break down the numbers: Oura's reported 600,000 unit sales by mid-2025, the shift from direct-to-consumer to B2B contracts, and how its FDA-cleared blood oxygen and heart rate sensors crossed the line fr...

Episode 30 of The Digital Health Podcast with Fexingo dives into how Dexcom turned continuous glucose monitoring from a niche diabetes tool into a mainstream wellness product. Lucas and Luna break down the key strategic moves Dexcom made to pull ahead of Abbott's FreeStyle Libre: the G7 sensor's smaller design, the decision to go direct-to-consumer with over-the-counter sales, and the controversia...