Comprehend, track, and succeed in ‘something big’ unfolding
Hyper Wellbeing Innovation Labs, Inc. was founded in September 2019 by Lee S Dryburgh. Its purpose is to help business comprehend, track, and succeed in ‘something big’ unfolding. That ‘something big’ is on the scale of the arrival of the PC or the smartphone.
A decade in the making
In 2006, Lee stopped running a global engineering consulting business to spend a decade conducting full-time, self-funded, self-directed study. Two separate areas held his interest. Communications technology innovation and optimization of human lifetimes.
He produced six pioneering conferences (five in California, one in Amsterdam) between 2008-2011. These were to advance his research and to help accelerate the democratization of communications innovation. They were zero profit by design.
On opening the debut event he declared that the “telephone was dead”; to be replaced by a “multi-sensor pocket super-computer” that would run telephony just an app, and an app among many at that (the audience were carrying keypad phones at the time). He championed the likely success of Android. Tech press and wireless analysts were predicting a failure. He partnered with Google to use the event as the first public airing of Android pre-launch.
Subsequent shows went from strength to strength. From demoing the first Android apps (pre-Play Store) to launching many startups that went on to have successful exits, to also producing the world’s first commercial augmented reality event.
I was very intrigued by people hacking Linux years in advance of Android and iOS, to run on mobile handsets; turning them into pocket computers with telephony as an app. That’s when I knew the tsunami of networked software was going to crash through the telecoms industry. And it did. Now I see the same storm brewing over healthcare, health and wellness. But this time it will be more transformative. The platform is us; our bodies and minds. People are hacking aging, disease risk and optimizing their health. It will form a new economic sector, one based upon data and machines. It’s far more exciting than the arrival of the PC or the smartphone.
— Lee S Dryburgh, Sep 2019 —
However he became increasingly dismayed as his forecasts became reality. His passion waned and he stopped production following the 2011 show.
Although now more democratized, he didn’t believe that the innovation was making a net positive life difference. As such he believed it was relatively meaningless and therefore counter to the value of his other interest, optimization of human lifetimes.
Naming the ‘something big’
However, one morning in April 2015 he realized that an intimacy line between humans and machines had been crossed. It would only deepen with time and as it did, optimization of human lifetimes would become increasingly possible.
Imbued with a sense of purpose again, he held space for fall 2016 at the Computer History Museum (Mountain View, California) for a new event to explore the possibility. The one paragraph event splash page read:
Connected technologies are knowing us ever more intimately. Our physical & sexual activities, motion & gestures, sleep & reproductive cycles, nutritional intake plus increasing physiological measurements. More recently our moods, emotions, thoughts, intentions & speech. They are also poised to know us from birth to death.— Hyper Wellbeing (Splash), May 2015 —
To signify the computing milestone he intended to call it the “third-computing revolution” conference. But as he was only interested in leveraging the revolution to elevate human wellbeing, he coined it after the aspiration and state instead, dubbing it “hyper wellbeing”.
It became evident though as ticket sales were underway that machines were decade/s away from engineering our emotional states, states of consciousness; let alone the psychological concepts of “flourishing” and “self-realization”. Wellbeing was too distant an aim.
Health and wellness though, was overdue. When viewed from the new human-machine relationship healthcare was dangerously antiquated.
Furthermore an inchoate system aligned with “hyper wellbeing” was underway. One that represented a market in excess of a trillion dollars within in a decade or less.
Whereas healthcare today is undergoing digitization, the new system represents the converse trend; computer and data science moving towards health and wellness.
Healthcare is passive, waiting to react to acute illness or injury. Prevention is limited to sanitation, antibiotics and vaccines; all major achievements of the 20th century. However the majority of illness and disease in the 21st century is no longer the result of bacteria and viruses. Instead chronic disease (often referred to as noncommunicable diseases) resulting from lifestyle choices and environmental influences over decades are the leading cause of death and disability.
Today, our most pressing health issues are caused by the lifelong, daily interaction among our genetics, environment, and lifestyle choices – a dynamic interplay of biology, our environment, our psychology and our behavior, interwoven.— Lee S Dryburgh, Jul 2016 —
Optimization services do not exist. It works from a 14th and 15th century binary paradigm; people are healthy or not. Health is qualitatively defined as “if you don’t have any apparent disease, and you look and feel OK, you’re healthy”. Health is in fact a spectrum, continuously extensible.
Besides, half of “healthy” people are not, they just haven’t progressed to the more dangerous stage of experiencing overt symptoms.
Lee coined the new industry Wellness-as-a-Service (WaaS) to capture it’s core characteristics. Including that it’s for “healthy” people as opposed to the sick or injured (for which traditional healthcare will remain); continuous, predictive and proactive; broader than the traditional definition of health; systems based; data and consumer driven; greater alignment with engineering principles and grounded in data science; positive health targets (e.g. deceleration of aging).