The Winning Healthcare SaaS Founder Journey: Funded by Millions in Grants

[00:00:15] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Hello and welcome to Lessons from the Leap. I’m your host, Ghazenfer Mansoor. On this show, I get to sit down with entrepreneur business leaders, talk about the business leaps, pivotal moments, and innovative ideas that bring their journeys.

This episode is brought to you by Technology Rivers. At Technology Rivers, we bring innovation through technology and AI to solve real-world problems. If you’d like to learn more about Technology Rivers, head out to technologyrivers.com and talk about your project. 

[00:00:40] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Today on Lessons from the Leap we are joined by Steve Waddell, founder and CEO of Index HealthTech, author of Valuepreneurs, and a TEDx speaker. Steve, welcome to the show.

Tell us more about you. I like to just leave the intro for our guests so that they talk more. So talk whatever you can, and then we’ll dig into your journey further later on.

[00:01:03] Steve Waddell: Sure. Thank you, Ghazenfer. I really like the name of your podcast, Lessons from the Leap.

It really is a leap when you jump off. I spent twenty-five years building nuclear powered aircraft carriers at Newport News Shipbuilding. And then I left and joined my wife’s woman-owned small business, Reed Integration Inc., and helped her grow it to a multi-million dollar government consulting business.

She’s doing really well, by the way. She just got on the Inc. 5000 again for the seventh or eighth time. And

[00:01:32] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Congratulations.

[00:01:33] Steve Waddell: Yeah, I’m pretty excited for her. And anyway, when I left in twenty eighteen, you watch Shark Tank and you get inspired, right? You think I can invent something, right?

These people are doing it and having success. So I kept thinking to myself, I didn’t want to reach retirement age and look back and say everything I did was for somebody else. And never took that leap, if you will, into entrepreneurship.

My first journey in that pivot was to start a company called Nasoni, N-A-S-O-N-I, after the Nasoni Fountains of Rome. Okay, so it was a hardware product. I’ll ask you this, Ghazenfer: when you go to rinse after you brush your teeth in the bathroom, do you tilt your head, cup your hand, or use a cup to rinse toothpaste?

[00:02:25] Ghazenfer Mansoor: And I’ll have to think about, yeah, you usually use the hand.

[00:02:31] Steve Waddell: Yeah. And your hands didn’t always clean. You don’t know because there’s a thing called the aerosol effect.

When you flush the toilet, bio aerosols get ejected. They land on the surfaces in the bathroom, the doorknob, the tech countertop, all of that. So I didn’t want to use my hand.Then you have cups that never get washed often enough. So I always just crane my neck. I’m thinking, it’s the twenty-first century, right?

Why can’t we do something smarter? And I happened to reinvent the bathroom faucet. This is it. You can see it here.They’re on Wayfair. But basically, all you do is rotate the lever and it becomes a water fountain. A very simple concept.

And I did it solely to make it better to rinse after brushing. I never realized that my wife, I’d see her use it every night. She would turn on the hot and the cold and get a warm, gentle fountain stream and rinse makeup off instead of cupping and splashing her face. I also didn’t think about it serving as an eye wash station.

[00:03:29] Steve Waddell: Right. I was out mowing the grass one day, and got something in my eye. I came back in, perfect eye wash.

And the journey was fun because I went out to raise funding to see if the idea had legs. And I won over $80,000 in startup competitions, including $50,000 on a TV show called Steve Harvey’s Thunderdome, shot at CBS television studios in Hollywood, California. I was actually on stage with Steve, competing against another entrepreneur for the audience vote.

[00:03:57] Steve Waddell: And convince the audience to vote for me. And I came away with a $50,000 check, which let me build my MVP that led to investment from two different investors.

But you talk about challenges that startups have, right? I encountered probably three to four black swan events on that journey. The first of which, if you remember in 2019, we had the 25% China tariff come out, right?

[00:04:26] Steve Waddell: I’ve got a $200,000 order coming to the East Coast. And just to unload the ship, I had to pay a $50,000 tariff. That was my entire marketing budget that got wiped out.

Then three months later, guess what happens? COVID. The worst pandemic in over 100 years, right?

And you can’t market a fountain faucet to drink from when people are wearing masks and fighting over toilet paper. And all the trade shows you planned were all canceled.

[00:04:56] Steve Waddell: Because you couldn’t have big gatherings of people. Right. So the next thing was my investor in Minnesota said, “You ought to think about, let’s, I know the head of product development at Home Depot. Why don’t we talk to them and see if we can work out a deal?”

I said, sure. I’ll drive down there in Georgia. I’m in Virginia.

I’ll just drive down and meet with them in person. And they said, no, we’re not taking visitors because of COVID. Okay, well, I’ll send you one of our faucets.

[00:05:24] Steve Waddell: So I boxed up one of these faucets, shipped it to them. He ended up coming back and saying, our customers prefer traditional faucets, so we’re gonna pass. I said, All right, I got you.

Well, a month, a year later, rather, Tiffany Crewman, who was on season one of Shark Tank, got a deal with Barbara Corcoran for her product Ava the Elephant. She emailed me and said the subject line was, “I’m so mad.” I’m like, what is she mad about? And I look in the email.

[00:05:53] Steve Waddell: And she had screenshot Facebook and she had run across a Home Depot advertisement for a fountain faucet. They knocked me off in their own brand, Glacier Bay. So now that’s another black swan event being copied by, ripped off by a Fortune 500 company.

Right. And my wife was an aerospace engineer. She’s a brilliant lady, blonde, though I tease her, I call her my rocket scientist. I hope she doesn’t see this.

But

[00:06:23] Steve Waddell: she said, you gotta think about a grant. And I’m like, what am I gonna do with a grant and a fountain faucet? But fortunately, I was introduced to Dr. Lisa Caperna.

Lisa’s the clinical director at Old Dominion University, Fashini Wallace Center for Restorative Health. And she saw it. She goes, my gosh, if I had a sensor version of this, we could help spinal cord injured patients live more independently.

[00:06:48] Steve Waddell: Pretty cool idea, right? Well, I had been struggling to keep the company alive because our marketing budget got wiped out, can’t sell the faucets, right? Bills are piling up. So I pulled money out of my 401k to keep the company alive.

And then I think, well, how am I going to write a grant proposal? Because grant proposals have about a 13% win rate, phase one. I said, I need to de-risk this.

So I went and found a grant writer and he had won 19 million in grant wins, but he told me it was going to cost $10,000 to help for phase one.

[00:07:20] Steve Waddell: And then I thought, okay, where can I get 10 grand? Well, you remember they had those PPP loans? It was that and then the other one’s ESOP.

What was that? The other one was PPP EIDL. Yeah, PPP and EIDL.

So I applied for that and I got 20 grand. And I thought, you know what, I’m gonna gamble half of this on a phase one proposal. I need the money, all of it, to pay bills, but I’m gonna gamble half that we can de-risk this phase one proposal enough to win it.

[00:07:50] Steve Waddell: So, long story short, we won the proposal for $314,000. Then the clinical trials went great. And now I wanted to apply for a phase two to continue the mission.

But phase two, my grant writer was gonna charge me $15,000 because it’s a lot more work to write phase two. It was about 178 pages that we ended up writing. And I’m thinking, now where am I gonna get $15,000?

[00:08:18] Steve Waddell: Well, if you don’t know, there’s an entity in the state of Virginia called the Virginia Innovative Partnership Corporation or VIPC. And they had a program called a Commonwealth Commercialization Loan, right? It’s a non-dilutive grant, and it was $75,000.

They’ve changed the program now. It’s a different title now, with a little bit of a different nuance to it. But I applied for that.

I won the non-dilutive grant for $75,000. Now you can’t just go hire a grant writer with that money.

[00:08:47] Steve Waddell: So what I had to do was align the deliverables of the grant writer to the needs of what I had to meet for the Commonwealth commercialization non-till-do funding, like the commercialization plan, things like that. And I ended up hiring my grant writer again, and I won $2.02 million now with the NICHD to continue the spinal cord injured development smart faucet, if you will.

[00:09:15] Steve Waddell: Did some really cool things, right? This is a generation of that solution that you can actually see here. You can see we’ve developed a tilt mechanism so you can wash your hair at the bathroom sink and things like that.

Spinal corners patients told us they’d like to control the faucet near their wheelchair. So we invented a remote control. And I even invented a capability called smart motion control,

[00:09:43] Steve Waddell: Where I can control the temperature of the faucet by the distance of your hand. No one’s ever done that before.

[00:09:49] Ghazenfer Mansoor: No, this is really cool. Cool stuff.

[00:09:52] Steve Waddell: Thank you. And anyway, along that time frame while we’re executing year one of the year two grant, of the phase two grant, rather, I thought about my mother in law as my father in law was declining with dementia back about eight years ago.

And she was in the shower helping him wash his hair. Well, he slipped and started to fall. She tried to catch him.

They both fell. He hit the toilet, she hit the shower track. And

[00:10:19] Steve Waddell: I thought, why can’t they wash their hair at the bathroom sink where it’d be safer? Well, the faucet’s not tall enough, which is ultimately why this now has this pivoting head on it, right?

But I thought, you know what, I’m gonna apply to the National Institute of Aging to develop a faucet specifically for Alzheimer’s and dementia patients. And I said, I’m gonna need a gerontologist on my team. So I went to Dr. Hamid O’Cravi.

He is the head gerontologist at Eastern Virginia Medical School, and told him what I wanted to do.

[00:10:48] Steve Waddell: And he says, Steve, I like you. I like the product idea. He said, My problem is I gotta call my patients every morning and every night to remind them to take their meds.

I said, let’s put it in the grant. Let’s make it one of the aims of the goal of the grant. And so we did.

And I hired my grant writer again. This time I was able to use some of my funding from the proceeds of the current grant I was working on, right? And we actually won 2.58 million.

[00:11:17] Steve Waddell: So now I’ve actually turned the company around from an original hardware company making fountain faucets and we have become a health tech company. And we were still gonna make faucets at the time, but on that journey, we had put in the grant proposal that we would put a camera in the faucet to monitor what the senior was trying to do.

Are they trying to wash their hands, wash their hair, brush, what was it? And how could we auto adjust the faucet for them, right?

[00:11:47] Steve Waddell: the temperature, which way it came out, whether it was coming out of top or out of the bottom. And we won the grant, but what we learned was once we got it, HIPAA requirements don’t allow you to put a camera in the bathroom. So now we can’t do what we set out to do.

Well my chief science officer is Dr. Bannerjee. He’s a professor, a full professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He’s also an NSF Career Award recipient, smart guy.

[00:12:16] Steve Waddell: And he says, Steve, we can measure ADL drift. I’m like, what is ADL drift? ADLs are activities of daily living that the things you do around the bathroom sink, how you walk, how you talk, all those things, right?

And then drift is the change from the baseline of how long it originally took you to do those things, that as you age, it now takes you a little longer. And we can measure that. And that’s when I came up with the idea to build.

[00:12:44] Steve Waddell: What we call the healthy habits index. And that’s where we’re headed now is the ability to measure neurodegenerative decline. So we’ve gone from a simple hardware fountain faucet to measuring neurodegeneration via ADL drift.

[00:13:01] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Cool, no, this is cool. you are able to leverage all that experience, expertise on a grant, on building the product, and you started this new one. And obviously, aging is a big problem and obviously this is a much needed problem. There are many more solutions needed for this industry for sure.

So

[00:13:20] Steve Waddell: Absolutely.

[00:13:21] Steve Waddell: And it’s not just a US problem, it’s a global problem. You know, in Japan,

[00:13:24] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Absolutely.

[00:13:25] Steve Waddell: In Japan, there was a company that was making diapers that actually switched to making adult diapers because there was a larger population of adults than there were kit babies that needed the diapers. So it’s

[00:13:38] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Interesting.

[00:13:38] Steve Waddell: A big market globally, and more than 11,000 people per day turn 65. And by the year 2030, all of the baby boomer population will all be over the age of 65.

[00:13:50] Steve Waddell: And so it’s a huge market. And you combine that with the fact there’s not enough caregivers, right? And people want to stay at home.

They don’t want to go to senior living. My father was that way, right? but what happened with him, he was a decorated army combat veteran, very independent person.

We could see changes in him, changes in how he walked, how he talked and all of that, but there was no way to measure it. And so ultimately what happened was he started falling.

[00:14:20] Steve Waddell: He had his accountant that lived in DC because my father worked at the Pentagon before he retired, but now he lives in Newport News, down in Hampton Roads near where I live, three hours from DC, right? And his accountant came down from DC one January day and found him on the sidewalk.

And so, my wife and I both work. We couldn’t have him live with us and watch him. So we had to move into assisted living.

And after going there, within six months, he stopped eating. He just gave up on life.

[00:14:49] Steve Waddell: And he passed away within six months. So my mission is to make sure others don’t have to live through what I did. And I actually made a challenge coin in honor of my father, and it says, Every life has a pattern and we catch the drift.

And that’s my father there.

[00:15:08] Ghazenfer Mansoor: No, no, these are important. Obviously, there’s nothing better than home. So all these people had these assisted living.

Yeah. I had somebody else at my podcast a few months ago and they’re very similar. They’re in a little bit of a different space.

They run these home care agencies, but their goal is to bring the patient back home and they provide that at-home support.

[00:15:35] Ghazenfer Mansoor: So and then we at technology rivers our businesses working with assisted living as well. So many products that we have made. So part of that is also connecting hospitals with the short term assisted living and like different tools that are built.

But yeah, this is definitely one of the areas nobody wants here, but it’s still one of those it’s not gonna be resolved in a day. So the sooner we can

[00:15:48] Steve Waddell:That’s right. We were at the Thrive Center last week in Kentucky. It’s the leading age tech showcase in the country. The National Institute of Aging was there as well, Todd Haim and others.

Todd controls the budget for the NIA. And we had Founders Day where we got to pitch to both operators and investors. And one of the pitches that we gave to the operators is, right now, there was a study done from by the Journal of Prevention of Alzheimer’s just in 2024, and it found that eight

[00:16:19] Steve Waddell: Of the expected mild mild cognitive impaired patients, residents rather, out of 100 were caught in primary care. And what that means is 92 were missed, right? So the blind spot is not the problem of who you think has a problem.

It’s the 92 that you don’t, that you don’t know about. And one of our one domain of our healthy habits index is speech. And within just 45 seconds of speech, we can.

[00:16:48] Steve Waddell: we can identify indications of Alzheimer’s, MCI, psychoactive impairment, Huntington’s, Parkinson’s, mood, stress, anxiety, depression, a number of factors. So, our value proposition is, we’ll do a pilot right now with customers for $99 a person, come in and give you that baseline and give you an exceptional report that details those that we found.

We start out by asking how many do you know of, let’s say of a hundred people?

[00:17:17] Steve Waddell: That has mild cognitive impairment or what have you will record that. And then we also say, okay, now let’s see what the differences are when we do our analysis and we provide that in a written report.

[00:17:30] Ghazenfer Mansoor: So based on all of this, you also wrote a book, Valuepreneurs. So can you talk about it? Obviously it talks about new rules for launching products.

So what does it mean? Who’s it for? Can you share, talk more about it?

[00:17:46] Steve Waddell: Yeah, sure. Absolutely. And thank you for asking about it.

So actually I started writing this book a couple of times, about three years ago. People said, Steve, you have learned so much on this journey in building Nasoni and going from nothing to having a product in the market and now, moving to winning grants and all of that. They said, you need to write a book and share that knowledge.

And so I finally took it upon myself to do so. And the book was originally going to be titled Something About Execution.

[00:18:16] Steve Waddell: And I was talking to Jason Pfeiffer. Do you know who Jason is? Jason is the editor of Entrepreneur Magazine and entrepreneur.com.

And I was telling him, I was interviewing him over a Zoom call one day, and I’m talking to him about the book. And he goes, Steve, I think you need a different title. And he said, have you ever heard of a book called The Third Door?

And I said, No. I said, Tell me about it. And he said, Well, put yourself in this position.

[00:18:44] Steve Waddell: You’re standing in line to get into a club and there’s a long line. The only way to get in is the bouncer at the front if he lets you in. Well, the other way to get in is to get in the VIP entrance.

Unless you’re a VIP, you’re not getting in there either. But if you’re in the no, there’s a third door. And the guy built a business around the metaphor of a third door.

So now I’m racking my brain. What am I going to call the book? And I’m at the Outer Banks one night with my wife and another couple.

[00:19:13] Steve Waddell: We’re on vacation for a couple of days. And all I can think about is the title of the book. We’re watching a movie on a big screen, in this house we rented.

And I’m sitting here thinking about the book. And I thought about a lady that had written a book on marketing, and she said, Sometimes you can take two words, put them together, and form a new word. Well, my process is called the value-driven product development process, and we start with who?

[00:19:40] Steve Waddell: like my Ted talk, which TED X talk, which we can mention, but it’s all about delivering value, right? And I got to thinking about it and I thought about entrepreneur and value and came up with the word valuepreneurs. And so that’s how the book got its title.

But the book basically has, you know, a step-by-step process on how to go from an idea all the way to selling. And it has checkpoints along the way. 

[00:20:07] Steve Waddell:You know, for example, once you have kind of validated your idea before you get it to build your MVP, we recommend filing your first provisional patent. And oftentimes people come up with the idea, they think they need a patent right away because somebody’s gonna steal their idea. That’s way too soon, right?

You want to first validate there’s a need. And we teach you that in the book. And then once you have validated that need, before you build your MVP, you file that provisional that gives you a one year timeline to figure everything out about the design of the product.

[00:20:39] Steve Waddell: Cause remember, when you write a patent, you’re writing exactly how that thing is made. And if and you don’t know that until you build the MVP and you test it out, right? That it works.

You got to build it for manufacturing. And so then we show you how to manufacture after that. But we also tell you that if you don’t have the skills to go through building the MVP, going through sales and marketing, and selling your product, you may be better off licensing your idea and having that provisional patent.

[00:21:08] Steve Waddell: then gives you the ability to go license it. And there’s some good books on how to license a product, like one by Stephen Key. One Simple Idea is the name of it. Things like that.

But the book walks you through all of that.

[00:21:22] Ghazenfer Mansoor: And I’m guessing it is for both software and hardware products, not just the hardware product, because the overall concepts are somewhat similar.

[00:21:31] Steve Waddell: They are, but patenting and software is a little bit different. and it’s a it, the concepts do apply. There’s a lot of applicable things there.

And how to write a trademark, how to apply for a trademark, things like that as well. And you’ll still benefit from it, right? And but software has some nuances, and we did not focus on nuances in the book for software, just to be honest.

[00:21:58] Ghazenfer Mansoor: So yeah, let’s talk about your TED talk. So obviously everybody knows about Simon Sinek and starts with why. And then another one of my favorites from what’s his name?

Dan’s name slips up and he has a book called Who Not How. That’s another favorite book. And now here I’m starting, start with who, not why.

So can you talk more

[00:22:22] Steve Waddell: Yeah.

[00:22:23] Ghazenfer Mansoor: About it? What’s behind this philosophy?

[00:22:28] Steve Waddell: Certainly. So, and thank you for asking that. The start with why I always felt wrong with me.

I get why, I understand it. But when you’re an entrepreneur, you can’t start with your why. And I’ll tell you why.

Think about Simonov, the guy that invented the ring doorbell, right? He did it because he wanted to see who was at the front door when he was working in his garage or wherever, right? He didn’t start with a simple reason that everybody would resonate with.

[00:22:57] Steve Waddell: He started with a problem. And then he had to figure out if there was a market for other people that had that same problem. And so he had to look at who and am I solving a problem?

The thing we got to focus on, do you know the difference between a painkiller and a vitamin? Your product needs to be one or the other, right? Which one is the one you want it to be?

I’m going to ask you. Do you want to be a vitamin or a painkiller?

[00:23:27] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Most people would want painkillers because that was gonna immediately solve the problem. But for the root cause you may go towards the vitamins or for the long term.

[00:23:36] Steve Waddell: So the answer is you want a painkiller. And the main reason is people are willing to spend money to solve pain. They’re not necessarily willing to spend money for something that may benefit you down the road, which is a vitamin, right?

And so that’s what you’re looking for is the painkiller. So that you can’t start a why and think you have a painkiller. You start with who and figure out what their pain is and how you’re going to solve it.

And so, also.

[00:24:04] Steve Waddell: I thought the topic, the title of the talk would, by being controversial, going against one of the most famous TED talks of all time, Simon Sinek, would resonate, right? So that’s why I named it start with who, not why. And I totally believe that’s the right approach, right?

Because that’s what entrepreneurs need to focus on to begin their product journey. Does it make sense?

[00:24:25] Ghazenfer Mansoor:  Yeah, and then with Dan’s book Who Not How, many times you have to find who’s gonna help you do it. Yes, the why is important, who is also important because if you don’t know who, then you don’t wanna be solving all of your problems yourself.

[00:24:43] Steve Waddell:  Well, I’ll go back to my example, Jamie Simonoff, right? Jamie when his ring doorbell actually grew bigger into something that has a why that he never thought about when he first invented it. And the reason nowadays, right, is safer communities.

How many times now do you see ring doorbell videos that police use? You know, and there’s lots of different use cases now. And he’s coming up with new products to amplify that.

That’s his reason, right? But it’s not who was at the front door.

[00:25:14] Steve Waddell: You know.

[00:25:15] Ghazenfer Mansoor:  I believe it was also solved at a different time of the problem. The why is important for why you are solving. That may be a pitch for investment, for marketing, for all of those.

Like why I’m solving. Yes, you do need people to resonate with you. But at the same time, now that I get past that, I know why I want to solve it.

Now I have this problem in hand. Then I have to work on my who rather than So they may be more as

[00:25:39] Steve Waddell: But you gotta keep it in order. You

[00:25:40] Steve Waddell: start with who? Who’s who are you solving the pain for? And then you can focus on why later.

[00:25:49] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Yeah. So

[00:25:49] Steve Waddell: Who’s got the pain?

[00:25:50] Steve Waddell: ‘Cause you gotta make sure you solve it. You gotta make sure you hit that pain and it is a solution for it.

[00:25:56] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Right. So it’s identifying the right market for that. And we see that obviously our business is building these healthcare software products. And we see that all the time in our business because it’s important as we’re solving those problems.

Like in our case, it’s like, who are you solving? And then who’s gonna also solve that problem? Like so there are two angles of this one.

One, who are like what is the specific? Is it for a woman? Is it for guys or is it for aging patients?

Like, are you solving that problem?

[00:26:26] Ghazenfer Mansoor: And then who’s gonna even actually do it? And then in in that

[00:26:28] Steve Waddell: Right.

[00:26:29] Ghazenfer Mansoor: case, who is technology is like, okay, who can help you build that product? So

[00:26:33] Steve Waddell: That’s right.

[00:26:34] Ghazenfer Mansoor: So coming back to the healthcare part. So obviously we continuously monitor glucose, blood pressure, all of those things. And but usually those functional decline is usually monitored during the visits, which is obviously a huge gap.So we need to have more.

[00:26:50] Steve Waddell: Call that episodic.

[00:26:51] Steve Waddell: Episodic understanding.

[00:26:53] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Right. But even still in today’s time when the technologies there are like for example we build remote patient monitoring where you can track blood pressure, it goes to the doctors, but still in majority of the cases, still that is between those with it.

So it’s not the react, it’s mostly reactive, not proactive. So what are your thoughts on this gap in healthcare and why is it so difficult to solve?

[00:27:18] Steve Waddell: That’s exactly what we set out.

[00:27:20] Steve Waddell: But now that’s exactly what we’re setting out to solve is what’s happening at home, right, between visits, right? Because that’s the void space you can’t see. Think about an Alzheimer’s patient that gets seen to do a mocha assessment or MMSC by their doctor once a quarter or once every six months.

I can tell you, my father in law would be on his best behavior in front of the doctor.

[00:27:47] Steve Waddell: I’ll give one great example at home, he was walking on his tippy toes, right? It was an odd behavior that was sometimes typical of people with Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, what things that nature. But at the doctor, when you told him to walk to that wall and back, he walked normally.

You’re performing at your best in front of the doctor because you don’t want to be seen as having a deficiency.

[00:28:16] Steve Waddell: When you’re in your natural state at home, if we can measure those things, then you get the real meaning of what’s going on, real understanding, right? And that’s what we do with our devices. We have a sense radar, we call the sense charger and the sense lamp.

And they’re in different environments in the home. And we monitor six domains: speech, hydration, hygiene, mobility, and routine. And all of those are scored.

[00:28:45] Steve Waddell: Right. We create a baseline. And from that baseline, we watch for deviations.

Now, that can work both ways. It can work on decline if you’re aging with Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s or MCI, things like that. But in reverse, let’s say you’re a stroke patient and you’re recovering.

We can measure your recovery. Or let’s say you’ve been prescribed a CPAP. Are you improving because of your sleep?

Not just as your AHI score, your hopnia index went down.

[00:29:15] Steve Waddell: but how are you actually functioning? Right? Are you improving your function?

So that’s the thing that’s missing, right? We have A1C for insulin resistance that we measure for diabetics. We have blood pressure for cardiovascular health and EKG, things like that.

There is no measure of functional decline. And that’s what we’ve invented with what we call our healthy habits index. It’s a simple zero to 100 score and when you see that score start to drop,

[00:29:42] Steve Waddell: You then look down below it and see which of the six domains is the score declining most in. And in one example, we’ve got, let’s say it’s mobility, right? Then the first thing you check might be intramuscular.

Do you need to start physical therapy to balance the program to boost your leg muscles? If it’s not that, it could be vestibular, an inner ear problem. If it’s not that, we look for maybe a recent medication change that could cause dizziness.

But it gives you the insights as to where the decline is occurring.

[00:30:12] Steve Waddell: So then you can figure out what to look for. Without that you’re flying blind.

[00:30:17] Ghazenfer Mansoor: True. So obviously you these tools are designed to identify changes because they occur before they become an event. But as a patient, you can figure out those things.

But how does it look for a clinician? Do you also provide them tools so that if something happened, they are also proactive because sometimes let’s say the false detection you mentioned about your

[00:30:43] Steve Waddell: Well, we’re aiming

[00:30:44] Steve Waddell: for false prevention and prediction. Of course we can do false detection as well. But for the clinician, we have a dashboard.

And I know a lot of times if you don’t want your other dashboard to log into, we can provide an API and integrate this into their system, right? And we can provide different reports, different data in those reports that can tell you here are some things to look for, here’s what we’re seeing.

[00:31:11] Steve Waddell: And here’s what’s typical when we see those things. And we base a lot of that data not only on what we’ve learned in the past, but also from PubMed. We’re building what we call a drift atlas, which is the very first map of functional decline.

And we’re building it on a supercomputer. and from that we build what we call predictive avatars that identify the predictions that we can make from the data we’ve learned from the radar, from PubMed, historical data and all of that.

[00:31:41] Steve Waddell: So that clinicians can take better care and better actions.

[00:31:46] Ghazenfer Mansoor: So AI. AI is changing everything, it’s impacting every field. How is it impacting your business?

Are you using AI anywhere and how are you using it?

[00:31:59] Steve Waddell: We use AI all the time. So number one, we also use it in some of our understanding and predictions, as I mentioned. We use machine learning and AI.

But just in a simple way in my daily life, we’re working on our grant proposal now. I’ll have AI analyze what we’ve done and we’ll reevaluate against our original proposal, see where any gaps are. And when I invent, let’s say a new patent idea, I really like before I give it to my IP attorney.

[00:32:28] Steve Waddell: I may work with Chat GPT, for example, to refine the idea, but then I’ll take those results and put them in Claude and I’ll get a different perspective for a few things. And then I may put it in Perplexity or Grok or Gemini. And I use all the tools and I bounce them off of each other because sometimes you’ll get hallucinations in one particular model or the other.

But when you combine them, it helps to filter some of that out.

[00:32:56] Steve Waddell: And then what I really love to do is use it when I go for a walk. My wife and I rescued German Shepherds. And we have to take them for a walk in the evening after work, things like that.

And while I’m doing that, I’m brainstorming with AI. I love doing that, because it’s just a great brainstorming tool. Also, I bought my first EV.

I didn’t think I’d ever like an EV because I just like big cars. I like driving trucks, and there’s never been one I liked.

[00:33:25] Steve Waddell: Well, I found the GMC Denali Max Range. It’s Sierra. And it’s fantastic.

It’s got 760 horsepower when you push Thor’s hammer mode. But what’s cool about it is it has Google Gemini built into it. So, Google Gemini is not on par, in my opinion, with Claude or maybe even with Chat GPT, but it’s fun in the truck, right?

I just drove to Kentucky and back, I was in the Thrive Center all last week and on the trip.

[00:33:55] Steve Waddell: You could ask me things like how far off the road is my next stop? Is it near the highway or do I have to drive kind of far off? Things like that are simple, but they’re very helpful, right?

Because I don’t want to let’s say I don’t want to go more than a half a mile off the road. Then it’ll find the and what’s a great place to have lunch? Who’s got the best ratings?

Simple things like that can just change your life. but I use it all the time for work. We all use it here.

[00:34:22] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Okay, so to wrap things, let’s play with our rapid fire round. So I’ll ask you a couple of a few small questions and then we’ll wrap up. So what’s one habit that keeps you grounded?

[00:34:35] Steve Waddell: That keeps me going?

[00:34:37] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Grounded.

[00:34:38] Steve Waddell: Grounded.

[00:34:39] Steve Waddell: Keeps me grounded. I guess, you know, looking on life and thinking how things could have been different and how they were different for my father and others, and the fact that I feel like we’ve got it pretty good today. So I’m very thankful and appreciative.

It’s ironic. I flew out to a TV show called Entrepreneur Elevator Pitch, and I lost. They didn’t open the door.

[00:35:08] Steve Waddell: And I’m flying home and I’m asking God, why did that happen when money’s tight? I didn’t need to spend all that money to fly out here. And little did I know that that show would air two weeks later.

And I was referred to by someone who had referred me to an investor, and I ended up getting a six hundred thousand dollars investment after that. So, God may have a different idea than what you’re thinking.

[00:35:32] Ghazenfer Mansoor: True,

[00:35:32] Ghazenfer Mansoor: absolutely. So what’s other than the current health problem you’re solving, what’s one healthcare problem that you would solve overnight?

[00:35:43] Steve Waddell: A healthcare problem I would solve overnight. Well, all of the disease states of Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and MCI are all terrible diseases. I recently learned that if we were to present some of these results to the patients directly instead of the clinician, there is a big suicide risk.

And it’s terrible to think you’re going to lose your mind. So I would love to solve that overnight if I could, and not have to provide a solution to identify it.

[00:36:13] Ghazenfer Mansoor: What’s one piece of advice that you ever received?

[00:36:19] Steve Waddell: Yeah. You remember the picture that has the egret and he’s swallowing a frog and the frog’s got him by the neck and it says, Never give up? That’s me, man.

[00:36:31] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Awesome. That’s

[00:36:33] Ghazenfer Mansoor: appeared as an entrepreneur.

[00:36:36] Ghazenfer Mansoor: So AI or sensors, which will change aging care more?

[00:36:42] Steve Waddell: Long term it’ll be AI. Censors may be earlier, but I think longer term it’s AI.

[00:36:49] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Okay. One word for the future of aging in place.

[00:36:53] Steve Waddell: It’s gonna get better.

[00:36:55] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Awesome

[00:36:56] Steve Waddell: AI

[00:36:56] Steve Waddell: is making a world of difference in ways we don’t even know yet. And Ray Kurzwell, who wrote the book Live Long Enough to Live Forever, sees the convergence happening in twenty forty-five. And so I’m fascinated by the future and by what AI is bringing.

[00:37:21] Ghazenfer Mansoor: We have been talking to Steve Waddell who has shared such valuable insights with us today. Steve, where can people find you? And share a link, LinkedIn. We’ll put it all in the description..

[00:37:35] Steve Waddell: Sure, and at LinkedIn it’s just LinkedIn dot com slash N slash Steve Waddell. And then my website is healthyhabitsindex.com And you can also look at valuepreneurs.com.

And then lastly, swaddell.com is my own personal domain. And that’s two D’s, two L’s.

[00:37:53] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Cool.

[00:37:55] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Yeah, we will put that in the podcast description. Thanks for listening to Lessons from the Leap. If you’ve enjoyed today’s episode, don’t forget to subscribe and share with someone who would find it valuable.

Steve, thank you very much. This is a really awesome podcast. Thanks for sharing all these valuable insights.

[00:38:13] Steve Waddell: Thank you for having me, it’s an honor.