Health and wellness startup Higi, backed by Wrapports founder Michael Ferro, partners with Chicago-based rapper, Lupe Fiasco as its creative director and investor.
The Chicago based startup, Higi (which rhymes with Ziggy) debuts their new mobile application this week at South by Southwest (SXSW) in Austin, TX. The app calculates a Klout-like score (ranging from 1 to 999) that combines body vitals such as blood pressure, weight and lifestyle choices to provide wellness analytics for self-trackers.
“It’s a FICO score for well-being,” said Dr. Khan Siddiqui, CEO of Higi, according to Chicago Business.
Utilizing kiosks at retail locations, such as national grocery stores, users will be able to quickly measure vital signs such as their weight, BMI and blood pressure. Higi also uses Facebook interactions as one way to factor in your personal relationships with friends and family as an important part of your overall well-being. After considering an individual’s particular body type, lifestyle and community scores, the final “Higi score” will allow users to see what changes they need to make in order to take better care of themselves for a longer, healthier life.
“When I first checked in, I was 160 [pounds] and my score was something like 760. I checked in today, and I was 155, but even though I lost 5 pounds I wasn’t active in my social activity enough and my blood pressure was a little high,” Lupe explained to Billboard. “It shows you how weight and wellness aren’t the same thing. You can be super fit and super depressed because you’re not interacting with your social network. You could work out and work out, but that doesn’t really translate to how happy you are in life. You could be at home super happy, super comfortable, just logging in to your computer all day, but your body is paying for it.”
The initial concept idea for Higi came after Ferro attended a meeting at the White House where the topic of “how to utilize social media networks to improve public health” came up. “Can we aggregate all the data, make it simple and fun to collect your data and share your data?” Dr. Siddiqui said.
Launched as both an app and physical pharmacy kiosk, Higi plans to rapidly scale the startup by rolling out the physical pharmacy kiosks in retailers like Shop Rite, Kmart and others. The startup has rolled out 1,000 of its kiosks over the past six months alone with plans of installing up to 10,000 Higi kiosks in retail pharmacy locations nationwide over the next year.
It looks like Higi plans to tap into their new creative director’s social network and Lupe has been actively promoting the company already. On Twitter, he changed his avatar to the Higi logo and sent a tweet to his 1.3 million followers announcing Higi’s new mobile application debut at SXSW. Higi has provided free stations at several locations throughout Austin.
“The dope part about this, other than just being creative director, is adding value to this company because it adds value to the world,” Lupe told Billboard.com.
Higi is also working to embed compatibility with other fitness tracking products like the Nike Fuelband and FitBit to provide a fully integrated wellness experience for its users.“The goal is to enhance the existing services, not compete with them,” said chief marketing officer Mustafa Patni. Only time will tell if Higi can carve out a respectable market share in an already crowded market.
(Featured image credit: Billboard)
