Institute For The Future

Congratulations to Zume Life on going live!

A company we have been following for a while, Zume Life, officially launches today.  Zume Life offers a personal health management system enables people who have ongoing health issues (e.g., chronic disease, weight loss, treatment recovery) to better track and adhere to their programs and regimens, and to draw on their personal support network.  Its mobile application, Zuri, and its web portal, are intended to facilitate the ongoing "4 R's" of ongoing self-care, which are:

• REMEMBER to do various health-related activities;
• RECORD these activities;
• REVIEW on-going health patterns and the interrelationships among different activities;
• RESPOND quickly to changes in health

I think the first time I met Zume Life founder Rajiv Mehta was at the first-ever Quantified Self meet-up hosted by Gary Wolf and Kevin Kelly in Kevin's (very cool) studio space.  Rajiv demonstrated a hand-held device called the Zuri, and indicated that the company's intention was to continue to develop it as a stand-alone device that one would carry in addition to one's cell phone.

So I was a bit surprised to visit the Zume website and see the Zuri looking an awful lot like an iPhone app interface. Indeed, I quickly learned that, "Currently, Zuri is available as an application that runs on the Apple iPhone and iPod touch. Currently, Zuri is available as an application that runs on the Apple iPhone and iPod touch." The Zuri app's interface offers several functions that will help users achieve the 4R's, including the ability to access the full functionality of the Zume Life web site via the iPhone web browser.

I remember that one of the coolest features of the Zuni device when Rajiv first demonstrated it was its ability to record audio that would then be transcribed by the Zume Life service so that you could later access it in text format (on your Zume Life web page, for example).  The iPod application has retained this functionality.

Again, congratulations and best of luck to Rajiv and his partner, Priya Kamani, MD.

[One final note: I have disclosed this before and feel the need to do it again. Richard Adler, an IFTF affiliate and occasional contributor to this blog, is an advisor to Zume Life and an early beta tester of the Zuri.  His relationship with Zume is completely independent of his work for IFTF, and this post in no way reflects an endorsement on IFTF's part of Zume Life. I just think that the Zuri device/app is kind of cool.]