The quantified self and quantified health trends frequently overlap — but few startups are quite as tightly screwed into that sticking place as Cue. Not yet anyway.
This San Diego-based startup, which was founded back in 2009 in the midst of the swine flu peak and has attracted more than $1 million in backing from an undisclosed U.S. angel investor, is building a hybrid electronic-mechanical-chemical connected device that it says will enable people to quantify their health at a molecular level.
And, with the help of the corresponding smartphone app, use the resulting data to tweak their lifestyle for the better — whether that’s to identify the most fertile times in their cycle to help them try for a baby. Or push their body to recover faster after a particularly punishing workout. Or identify a vitamin deficiency and tweak their diet to compensate.
The scenario they sketch for Cue is that people are going to be able to run their own ‘before and after’ experiments at home to quantify whether a particular fitness routine or diet is actually having a beneficial result on their own body.
There’s no external lab in this diagnostic loop requiring the user to send off samples. Rather the Cue device itself is the lab, and it lives at home — connecting to your smartphone by Bluetooth to feed data into the Cue app.
Cue’s makers dub it a “deep health tracker” — since it’s actually tracking the user’s health on a molecular level, rather than more remotely monitoring signals like heart rate or blood pressure.