Skip to main content

Digital Trends may earn a commission when you buy through links on our site. Why trust us?

Keep closer tabs on your health with Sensely, a virtual nurse app

sensely virtual nurse 12764609 967677179978317 2439254481883024037 o
Image used with permission by copyright holder
Why go to the doctor if the doctor can come to you? Not necessarily by way of a house visit, but by way of your phone. That is the question San Francisco-based startup Sensely is asking and while it is not bringing the doctor to your mobile device, it is bringing the next best thing — a nurse. With Sensely, you can enjoy not only a virtual nurse, but also telemedicine, patient education videos, monitoring of vitals, and more.

Adam Odessky, who co-founded the app and now serves as its CEO, told TechCrunch that the platform is “a cross between Whatsapp and Siri that captures all the important signals about a person’s health.” Like Siri, Sensely lets you simply talk to it — there is no typing required. This seems particularly useful for older patients, who perhaps don’t have the patience to fiddle with small smartphone or tablet screens to input vital information. Users can let their nurses how they are doing every day (or every few days) by way of five-minute check-ups, and this data is aggregated into a record that can be shared with an authorized healthcare provider.

Sensely can supplement these qualitative reports with data from medical devices, whether they are fitness wearables or hardware provided by a doctor. In order to provide customized healthcare solutions, Sensely responds differently to different diseases. For example, if you have diabetes, Sensely will help you “maintain optimal glucose levels and reduce their risk for diabetes-related complications” by monitoring your daily glucose levels, weight, ocular health, and podiatric health. However, if it’s congestive heart failure you’re concerned about, Sensely will keep closer tabs on blood pressure and diet.

The app is continually looking to provide unique solutions for patients across age groups and TechCrunch reports the app is “always layering in more protocols and content, usually from partner hospitals and clinics, to expand to cover different health issues and populations.”

While Sensely can help monitor your health on a daily basis, its goal isn’t to replace human healthcare professionals. “There aren’t people doing this job already. You couldn’t possibly have humans do this amount of phone calls and data analysis,” Odessky said. “This is a technology to help medical professionals do their jobs more effectively, and not one that threatens their livelihood.”

Download for iOS Download for Android

Lulu Chang
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Fascinated by the effects of technology on human interaction, Lulu believes that if her parents can use your new app…
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more
AI turned Breaking Bad into an anime — and it’s terrifying
Split image of Breaking Bad anime characters.

These days, it seems like there's nothing AI programs can't do. Thanks to advancements in artificial intelligence, deepfakes have done digital "face-offs" with Hollywood celebrities in films and TV shows, VFX artists can de-age actors almost instantly, and ChatGPT has learned how to write big-budget screenplays in the blink of an eye. Pretty soon, AI will probably decide who wins at the Oscars.

Within the past year, AI has also been used to generate beautiful works of art in seconds, creating a viral new trend and causing a boon for fan artists everywhere. TikTok user @cyborgism recently broke the internet by posting a clip featuring many AI-generated pictures of Breaking Bad. The theme here is that the characters are depicted as anime characters straight out of the 1980s, and the result is concerning to say the least. Depending on your viewpoint, Breaking Bad AI (my unofficial name for it) shows how technology can either threaten the integrity of original works of art or nurture artistic expression.
What if AI created Breaking Bad as a 1980s anime?
Playing over Metro Boomin's rap remix of the famous "I am the one who knocks" monologue, the video features images of the cast that range from shockingly realistic to full-on exaggerated. The clip currently has over 65,000 likes on TikTok alone, and many other users have shared their thoughts on the art. One user wrote, "Regardless of the repercussions on the entertainment industry, I can't wait for AI to be advanced enough to animate the whole show like this."

Read more