Optimize Your Health With Wearables – Insights on the Future of Healthcare | Google’s Senior Medical Lead, Dr. Kapil Parakh

Kapil Parakh (0:01)

But wearables have come a long way from just tracking steps to tracking a whole bunch of variables.

The frontier that we're at now is how to integrate them into the rest of the health system. These are all foundational principles that you need for a fulfilled, wonderful life, and we have access to the tools to get there.

Michael Gervais (0:29)

Welcome back, or welcome to the Finding Mastery podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Michael Gervais, by trade and training a high-performance psychologist. And I am thrilled to welcome Dr. Kapil Parakh to the podcast for this week's conversation.

Kapil is a renowned cardiologist and the senior medical lead at Google, which means he's working on some pretty radical stuff. Kapil is more than a doctor, he's a leader in the wearable movement with keen insight into current trends and future directions. And when it comes to wearable health technology, I'm in. You've heard me love Slob about Apollo Neuro, and if not, I want to encourage you to check them out, and I think you'll love what they're doing. So the question is, as we integrate more technology into our daily lives, and as the world of health technology progresses and evolves rapidly, what possibilities can they help us unlock?

How can they numb us as an instrument? How can we leverage the power of wearables to go beyond mere physical tracking and genuinely enhance our psychological well-being as well? These questions form the springboard for our conversation with Kapil. He was raised in Zambia. He was educated at Johns Hopkins. And his diverse background infuses Silicon Valley innovations with a deep empathy of human-centered medicine. That combination is pretty cool. His trailblazing work is redefining health care and guiding us toward a healthier, more informed future. He's also the author of Searching for Health, the smart way to find health information online and put it to use.

It's a practical guide for navigating the complexity of today's healthcare landscape. At his core, he is dedicated to empowering as many people as possible. He's helped launch products that have impacted over a billion lives. It feels like he's just getting started. Whether you're a passionate tech enthusiast, a health professional, or more simply looking to level up your game, Kapil's insights promise to elevate your perception of what's possible with wearables. To empower you to make informed decisions that resonate with your body's own unique needs. So with that, let's jump right in today's conversation with Dr. Kapil Parakh.

Kapil, I am so excited for this conversation. Thank you so much for carving out time in your very full schedule. And you wear so many different hats.

Which one are you wearing today?

Kapil Parakh (3:07)

That's a great question. Just me. So this is my personal opinions.

What I say is like, you know, I work at Google, I see patients at the VA as a cardiologist, I have affiliations as an adjunct professor at Yale and Georgetown.

But today, you're just getting me. These are my personal opinions.

Don't buy stock based on anything I say. This is just my personal opinion and nothing more.

Michael Gervais (3:29)

Okay, so you have this really unique background, this unique vantage point that allows you to see around some corners. And could we maybe get a glimpse of what's coming down the pipeline with health tech?

Kapil Parakh (3:43)

Yeah, absolutely. So I think we're in this super exciting time.

And if you think about it, you know, when you look back to when the internet came or when smartphones came around, we knew it was big, but we just didn't know what it would look like. And when Google first launched or Amazon or pets.com, you didn't know which one was going to be successful and what it would look like. You just knew you were in an exciting time. And I think we're in that same sort of age right now with artificial intelligence. So it's a really exciting time.

Michael Gervais (4:11)

Okay, I love it. What are you excited about?

Kapil Parakh (4:14)

So when you look at artificial intelligence, what it does, so I have a background in epidemiology. And when you think about like mathematical models, in the past, what we could do is do like a regression model where you have some data points, you draw a line through it and say, this is a general direction where things are going. And that gave us things like the Framingham equation, which tells you your risk of heart disease. You put in some numbers, it gives you a risk factor.

The next thing that sort of came along was machine learning. So anybody who has a phone knows that it will find pictures that look like your kid or yourself or your spouse or whatever. And you never sat and label every photo. This is my kid, this is me. It just says, hey, these things all kind of look alike. And that's machine learning. It understands these patterns in data, even though it's not ones and zeros in the sense of numerical data, it's image. And it still figures out those trends.