Expert Q&A: AI & personalization in holistic health with Luca Cuccia
The following interview is a transcript excerpt from The Heallist Podcast episode. Listen to the full audio version below and subscribe to get notified of new episodes.
Explore how AI is transforming holistic health with Luca Cuccia, founder and CEO of Injoy. In this episode, Luca shares his personal journey of overcoming health challenges and his groundbreaking work in gut healthcare. Learn how AI is revolutionizing health data management, empowering practitioners with better insights, and freeing up more time for compassionate, patient-centered care.
Dive into the impact of AI in gut health, personalized wellness solutions, and how practitioners can integrate AI tools while maintaining the human touch in medicine. If you're curious about the future of holistic health and technology, this is a must-listen!
Connecting Wearable Data for Holistic Care
Luca Cuccia: I think a lot of the issues that we have is that our entire medical system was not designed for chronic care support. It was really designed in the simplest fashion of describing accidents, broken bones, things like this. But as soon as issues arise where repeated care is necessary, it becomes very difficult, and that's why traditional care is under so much scrutiny and why holistic care is so much more appreciated, because the whole point of it is that time is given to the individual when they come to see you.
In terms of tracking and making that information relevant for practitioners as a whole, I think a really important aspect is connecting those pieces of information: how you're sleeping, the amount of activity you're experiencing, body temperature, all these different data points and translating it into data that is more familiar in the practitioner world. We do the same thing when it comes to the microbiome. I don't expect every practitioner on the planet to know specific bacteria and what to do about them, but what we try and focus on is making sure that we translate that data into actions that they do understand.
So not looking at one area of data in isolation is definitely critically important. For example, you can't look at the microbiome and ignore the other areas of health, which is a downfall of a lot of other companies that are out there. Instead, it should be looked at in the context of how you're sleeping, what you're eating, how active you are, any symptoms that you might be experiencing, because the truth is that's the information that most practitioners will understand. They understand symptoms. They understand diet. So whenever we track data, whether it be asking someone to tell us how active they were the day before, how they slept, what they might have eaten, symptoms that we're experiencing, we always put it towards standardized metrics that any practitioner will understand. So these are more formally known as patient-reported outcome measures. They're kind of the surveys that a practitioner might go through with a patient when they speak with them.
But a lot of the data that we have, like wearables, for example, is not connected to that. So you go to your practitioner and you say, okay, look at my Oura Ring score, here's my activity score today, here's my sleep score, and so on. There's not much that can be done with that currently, just because it's not on a scale that they're familiar with. Something that we're really working on now is how to translate it to those scales that people are accustomed to working with, just so that it can be relevant within the context of their care.
I think it's a big issue where we have all this amazing data whether it be consistently tracked through wearable, passively tracked through steps on your phone but it doesn't really get out of wellness and I think a lot of it is a translation problem. So that's really the big area, and how we make it applicable to care is making sure that information that's being tracked whether it be in the wellness sphere, wellness wearables sphere or something else is being presented in a way that is familiar, because you and I both know practitioners are extremely busy. I don't fault them for not wanting to learn new things, but we can present them with new information, so long as it's in a format they're accustomed to seeing.
Understanding Gut Health and Personal Data
Luca Cuccia: Coming back to uncovering patterns in your health that you might not realize is a big one. I don't know if it's just an accountability issue – they don't want to say something and be wrong about it, but for us, we're heavily focused on that in our work. That we do because we see the confidence you can get from it. if I do these things I'm going to sleep pretty, pretty well tonight, and that same type of feeling, that same confidence in your body, is what we want people to experience that are dealing with chronic health issues, because I think there's a lot of conversation around suffering in silence, especially when it comes to digestive health or gut health issues, Because it's not like you're missing a limb, it's not like you're losing your hair.
These are things that people, for unjust and just reasons, just might not realize. So the example of you coming to dinner and not being able to eat everything because it's going to cause you issues, and people just saying, “oh, what's the big problem? Just have it.” Especially around the holidays, that tends to be an issue for people. But being able to confidently say I can't eat this because I know that it's going to impact my symptoms I have the data to show it, as well as my own personal experiences that I can show is really really powerful for people, and we've had countless of people who have taken our tests and have used our app and said that the information that we were able to uncover for them was exactly what they needed to then go see their practitioner with confidence and advocate for themselves at the base level. So I think providing confidence for people, feeling like they understand what their body's trying to tell them, and getting to the point where your data is being used to support your health goals, is a really, really important level that we want.
The main thing is to make sure that you're keeping your own thoughts in check as you're looking at all this data, because it can easily make you go crazy at the same time if you become too data obsessed.
Translating Body Signals With AI
Luca Cuccia: Gut health has its place across that entire sick-healthy spectrum, and I think the problem that a lot of us face today in the modern world is that we're very disconnected from our bodies, which I think is kind of what we're discussing here, where wearables can help us understand some of the underpinnings of what's going on day to day. But on top of that, we have so many external stressors. We have processed foods that have become the norm in the diet for the high majority of people. We have antibiotic overuse, which has its own problems. We have environmental hazards, we have chronic stress and because of that, our bodies are missing out on a lot of the natural elements that they need, contributing to a lot of the widespread health issues that we see today, especially in chronic health. And on top of this, because we're so busy, because we're always running to the next thing, we don't take that time to check in with our bodies. So we've been on our own journeys, so being able to look into that raw data is something that is second nature to us, but I don't put that expectation on everyone.
The disconnection between us and our bodies is becoming more and more important, and some people are definitely aware of it. That's where the whole biohacking revolution is coming from, but the sad part is that a lot of these people don't necessarily have the background to act on it properly. So we see people focused on taking 30 different supplements before they're even considering the fundamentals of their diet, their sleep and their stress, which I think we all know is going to have a much larger impact before the supplements. And if you don't address those things first, the supplements can't have their effect. So understanding the place for those things is super important.
It really all comes down to helping you understand what your body's trying to tell you. The way I like to think of what we do is that we're essentially just translators. Your body has all the information it's trying to tell you what it needs, but we're so disconnected that we don't know how to speak the language anymore. So what we really do is help people focus on those seven hours that they're typically spending in the bathroom on a weekly basis and turn that into concrete, powerful health insights using artificial intelligence, using microbiome testing, using smart sensors, because there's around 60% of people, especially adults, who are struggling with gut health issues and health issues in general, and they're experiencing symptoms but they're not able to make the leap of turn it into? What do I do next so that gut health optimization is something that we're really focused on, so that we can make gut health and health itself as natural as your daily routine.
AI Integration in Health Practice
Luca Cuccia: One of the most important things that people can do is use AI as something to support education, being able to keep up to date on information. There's several newsletters out there that are constantly distilling all the information from different areas of health that are super relevant for people to keep up with, down to just managing your day-to-day practice. How do you support people better when they're not directly in front of you? AI is going to be the best way to do that. I think practitioners should definitely take the leap in understanding that AI could be a complement to their care.
