Most health trackers on the market start the day by handing you a number. A number that can influence how you feel about yourself and the day ahead. Sleep score. Readiness score. Recovery score. Timothée Manschot, co-founder and CEO of Polsen Health (formerly NOWATCH), doesn’t think a number should get to decide how you feel.
A score, he argues, is the first step towards externalising your health: it gamifies you, it sets you in competition with yourself and, above all, it dictates to you rather than teaching you to feel in tune with your own body. His view puts him at odds with his competitors. Your health is not a game, and it shouldn’t be lived like one.
Polsen Health is an Amsterdam-based company that sells a deliberately screenless wearable that it calls an “awareable.” The device tracks stress, sleep and recovery second by second and reports values, not verdicts. There is no subscription. That last part is a business decision Manschot treats as a matter of principle: a monthly fee, he argues, gives a company an incentive to keep you hooked, and health data is the last place that incentive belongs.
Manschot spoke to Unfiltered at HLTH Europe in Amsterdam, where Polsen Health was launching its second-generation device, the NOWATCH B. His framing for what the company is doing is “compassionate technology”, his term for a second generation of wearables built around prevention and self-knowledge rather than optimisation and performance.
He is not naive about the market tide he’s swimming against, and he’s generous about the incumbents. He rates Oura, backs its valuation, and says the category leaders do phenomenal things. His disagreement is philosophical rather personal: he thinks the subscription model needs rethinking, he wishes Meta had found a different business model, and he believes the honest problem underneath the whole sector is that trackers lose people over time because the number on the screen stops matching how life actually feels.
Why does Polsen Health exist?
We define our mission as: technology should support us. It’s not there to just dictate to us or take over. It should, first and foremost, support us. And it should support us to come to a more healthy and meaningful life. I mean meaningful because I often see that that’s also a challenge. So the whole relationship with technology, and it’s also the relationship with your health and technology, is something that is at the core of what we see as a design question for our company. So why do we exist? To make a meaningful contribution to the health landscape.
What’s the key difference between what you offer versus the rest of the market, the big names, like Oura?
Well, I admire some of these. They’ve proven the market. They’ve clearly led it. And we’re in a phenomenal time where we see a form of emancipation on the individual side. Sometimes I think about, a long time ago, when the doctor or the priest stood between you and the information, and you always needed a translator, whether in Latin, for religious purposes, or for your health. Nowadays this comes closer and closer to the individual. I think that’s great.
Consumer wearables play a role in that, also in developing a curious mindset about what’s going on in your body. Obviously it requires a tremendous amount of accuracy, and proximity to science, in order to know what you should be knowing, and not just go after an interpretation of an AI that you can’t really trace.
If I look at the wearable landscape, we’ve seen consumer adoption over the last 15 years change dramatically, starting from adoption in a fitness context for like half an hour a day, to now 24 hours a day where people wear it continuously.
In a way, that defines the first generation of wearables. And I believe that we are at the start of a second generation of wearable technology, and we coin that “compassionate technology”. It means that it’s not optimising or about performance. It’s about prevention. And we want to be one of the torch carriers for that movement, where we really question the relationship with tech, and how that data should play a role in your health journey.
Can you be both? Can you be both compassionate and performance-focused, or do you have to pick one?
That’s a really good question. The answer is, you can always be both. It’s a nuanced answer. But if we tear down compassionate technology a little bit, take the topic of scoring. We often see scores in apps, and they simplify a reality and give it back to you with a simple score.
I understand that for the user it might be a quick way to glance at how your sleep was. We take quite a fierce stance against that, because we feel that it’s the first step towards externalising your health. Not only because it gamifies you, and it sets you up in competition with yourself, or sometimes with others, but more so because it defines you, dictates to you, and it’s technology dictating to you. It’s not a step towards developing what we call introspective awareness: you increasing your ability to feel your body, to feel your heart rate, to understand the response of your physiology to life’s demands.
And a score is very different than a value. So yes, we provide you with all the values, and it looks amazing, but it doesn’t need to be a score. A score is very arbitrary, and it’s not on your path to feel yourself. A heartbeat is very different than a sleep score. So if we talk compassionate technology, it should be something that doesn’t dictate to you, something that supports you in your process of getting to know yourself better.
A lot of the other options in the market shape their products around what’s easiest to get the brain to engage with, streaks, scores, all these things. Are they cynical in doing that?
Good question. I’m certain that there are thought leaders and good reasons behind everyone’s approach. In our take, engaging someone requires the right motive. We don’t have an agenda for you, I think that’s the most important takeaway.
We are not here to help you achieve a certain agenda. Of course you can set goals for yourself, but we don’t set that for you. We want to meet you where you are, increase your understanding of your own body, and from that point support you in your life.
If you are more of a biohacker, or more into a certain athletic goal that you want to reach, then it’s perfectly healthy to go around a certain training scheme. But in terms of a daily relationship with health information, I think it should be much more passive, in the background, only showing up when there’s something meaningful to say. The reality is that’s not every day. You look at the meaningful long term, and that’s where the meaningful things surface.
Beyond the market you’re in, how well do you think humans have adapted to all the technology in our lives?
I’m fascinated. First, I see this as a big wave of technology coming at us. Technology always serves, if you go back through our history, it served our species tremendously. And I’m a big technology advocate. But I do think that, especially for us startups in tech, we have a huge responsibility to be close to the interest of our customer.
One point of critique, if I may, on the sector: I think we should think about the business models. If you sell a subscription to an app, you have an incentive to make that app engaging, and people want to feel the value every month, or they will churn. We don’t have a subscription. We don’t think that’s the right approach. It’s harder, yes. I think we have a very good formula to crack there. But you need to think about your reason for existence in the larger sphere, and add something meaningful to the landscape.
How can you make the non-subscription model work?
Again, technology is going so fast, I think everybody needs to reinvent themselves every day. For us, we’ve chosen the clear purchase model, with a clear margin. And then around that there are monetisable moments, depending on the intensity that people use it. But it’s not affecting your relationship with your own health data. I think that’s the most important thing. So we don’t gamify you into the app. Because ultimately your health is not a game. It shouldn’t be driven by that.
Do you think we are manipulated by our technology?
Definitely. I think we see that on a massive scale. If you just look around you here, everybody’s glued to their phones. That’s the first expression of manipulation. And if you see the screen time, it’s just devastating. Everybody’s worried about that. I think we have to find a solution for that on a societal level.
It’s also an expression of business models behind it that are skewed against the interest of our health. So yes, manipulation is there. Not all manipulation is wrong, you can be assisted in achieving your goals. But it shouldn’t be the default modus. I think that’s the most important point.
And how aware do you think people are of that?
Awareness is growing. Research is clearly pointing in that direction. So it’s a matter of the industry catching up, and I think it’s also a form of leadership, thought leadership, to try to translate that into a better product. It’s always this dynamic between: are you catering to an existing demand, or are you able to create a new category? We think part of the category’s problem is that people are sometimes gamified into an external health checker. And we believe that we can reinvent it to align better with people’s interests. Eventually you’ll be recognised for it, and eventually you’ll surface as a better choice.
If lots more people start agreeing with you, do you think the others will just start copying you?
Competition is a funny mechanism. In a way, you can think that you can lead and then other people will follow. I’m pretty convinced that this is not just one insight with us, I think everybody’s thinking about this. I do think that sometimes you can be stuck in a business model, and it’s hard to innovate your way out of it. Look at Meta, for example. I would wish for them that they’d found a different business model. But I’m optimistic about the ability of others to add to the competitive landscape. It will help us, having to go faster as well.
There have been a couple of really big valuations, Oura valued at $11B and Whoop at $10.1B recently. Do you think they’ll live up to those valuations?
No doubt in my mind. And the reason why: they are both very different categories. The landscape is huge. There are a lot of others, and the two you just mentioned are so unique, such strong brands, and they do phenomenal things for their target audience. I do think that the subscription model needs rethinking. But that market is growing so hard that, if you judge them by the numbers, they’re relatively small players. And there’s a vast world to win. I hope that we can contribute to that.
How do you think your products will develop over the coming years?
First of all, we want to shift the narrative. I hope that if we can stimulate some of the status quo to be more aligned with the long-term health effects for its wearers, you’ll see, hopefully, more retention, because I think that’s the brutal truth. The retention in wearables is not great, because people understand over time that it’s not always aligned with their feelings of having a meaningful, happy, healthy life. I think we can add there, definitely.
