Fitbit for your blood 🩸

What’s better: getting in 10,000 steps a day or switching to a Mediterranean diet? Well, it depends. Being able to tell what’s making you feel great (or not) is hard and varies by person.

Enter Cor.

We first heard about it six years ago when founder Bob Messerschmidt launched a crowdfunding campaign. As the former Director of Platform Architecture for Apple's Optics and Spectroscopy team, Messerschmidt had worked on bringing Apple Watch health sensors to market. After a long hiatus of heads-down building, Messerschmidt is back.

Cor is an at-home infrared spectrometer that uses your blood to provide insights into how lifestyle tweaks affect your health.

Infrared spectrometers use specific wavelengths of light to identify and quantity molecular changes. The spectrometer is the size of a WiFi router and comes with analytics tracking tens of millions of data points. You’ll have to prick your finger and gather a small sample of blood every week, but according to the team, you’ll be able to discover what food and fitness practices have the highest impact on you.

This might feel familiar to one infamous Silicon Valley scandal many of us are watching unfold in a dramatized TV series right now. In contrast to Theranos’ culture of secrecy, Cor shares its plans publicly, explaining that insights and profits from their early adopters help scale data and bring the product to the average consumer. Messerschmidt has also been clear about what data Cor can and can’t provide. In an interview with Forbes, he compared the device to current wearables – you can think of Cor as being “1,000x more sensitive than Apple Watch.”

Still, if you’re squeamish at the sight of blood, but like the idea of taking more control over your health, Mage recently launched to help you own your medical records, kind of “like a passport for going into medical facilities.” You can share your health record with a hospital but only for the duration of the visit.

Community-monitoring tool Orbit is launching Gravity today, a print and web magazine about building and scaling communities.

This first issue covers analytics tools, how to determine community KPIs, and suggestions from experts on which metrics they track and why.

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