One morning, when Dustin Freckleton was in medical school, he woke up with a blinding headache. He stumbled to the bathroom and saw that his vision was off — or rather, he was. He wasn’t able to stand up properly. He looked down and realized that his foot was turned inward. He started to feel a numbness down his left side and by the time he made his way back to his bedroom he fell over, paralyzed on that side of his body.
LVL plans to sell a connected wearable that tracks your body’s drinking and overall hydration levels. It works by using a new sensor type to track water in the body. And the algorithm that powers LVL’s wearable, could even become one of the new versions of other popular wearables later this year. And it’s the algorithm rather than the hardware that LVL really wants to sell.
Feckleton is meeting with several large consumer technology companies to pitch LVL’s algorithm for their products, using the new sensor. The algorithm takes into account how blood is moving throughout a person’s body, their heart rate, and how often they drink water to calculate what LVL calls a Body Thirst metric.
This metric is going to correlate to thirst because by the time a person feels thirsty, she is actually around 2% dehydrated. Feckleton hopes to trigger people to drink before that point.
A cynic might argue that it won’t correlate to thirst because that’s a measurement that could prove or disprove the algorithm. However, Feckleton says he has proof the algorithm works. He asked the University of Arkansas to complete a small study on the effectiveness of the LVL tech, and the results were promising. The study showed that LVL tech had a strong ability to anticipate perceived thirst and detect actual hydration during several different types of activity.