Dieta Health raises $1.2M to Personalize Digestive Healthcare

Los Angeles, CA - August 19th, 2021: Dieta Health announced a $1.2M pre-seed funding round led by Tom Williams of Heron Rock Fund with participation from Techstars Ventures (follow-on), Cedars-Sinai, and Verissimo Ventures. The group of investors backing Dieta include the largest healthcare payer, a top gastroenterology medical center, and a robust group of healthcare entrepreneurs and corporate leaders. This capital raise highlights Dieta’s vision of building a future where digestive healthcare is more affordable, accessible, and personalized with AI. The additional investment will allow Dieta to accelerate the expansion of its platform to more healthcare institutions and GI patients. 

Irritable Bowel Syndrome affects 11% of the global population. But what makes this condition particularly hard to treat is the difficulty in defining and objectively measuring it. Bowel movements have always been measured subjectively, with patients observing their stool and guessing how to report it to their doctors based on the Bristol Stool Scale. Doctors and clinicians use these subjective descriptions to try to choose between hundreds of treatments options that are available to patients, often getting it wrong and leaving the patient confused and demoralized. 

Dieta has built the world’s first mobile app with stool image recognition technology to objectively measure multiple characteristics of stool and use the resulting data to classify patients into distinct categories. Dieta’s stool AI technology was recently validated in a human clinical trial at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center where AI classifications were compared to annotations of expert gastroenterologists (results expected to be published in October 2021). The Dieta platform also helps manage GI care by letting patients track diet, medications, treatment interventions, and communicate with their clinical team.

The Dieta Team is Growing:

Dieta Health is HIRING - for business development & operations, product management, data science, and design. Coming out of 2 of the top healthcare accelerator programs, validating its AI technology in a clinical trial, and signing its first 3 institutional customers, there is no better time to join this team and movement to revolutionize digestive healthcare.

About the team: 

Asaf Kraus, Dieta’s CEO and Founder, is a professional data scientist and an IBS patient. In 2017, he was working on machine learning applications as a Data Scientist at Uber, when he was diagnosed with IBS. He spent most of his time outside of work for 1 year consulting with many clinicians, experimenting with dozens of treatment options, and even participating in a clinical trial with an experimental medication (where the idea for stool image recognition was born). The painful and confusing journey he faced as a patient led him to believe there was a better way to measure and manage IBS, one that leveraged modern data and AI technologies. Dieta’s applications have already been used by over 5,000 patients and dozens of clinicians. And the Dieta team is looking forward to scaling this technology to millions more patients with this important milestone of Dieta’s first fundraise.

For more information contact support@dietahealth.com or visit dietahealth.com

Dieta Stool Image Recognition is Live

Bowel movements have been measured subjectively since the beginning of time… until today. We’re excited to release Dieta’s stool image recognition technology, live in the Dieta app (iOS, Android).

Why?

11% of the global population suffers from Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS). But the definition and classification of IBS is derived from the Bristol Stool Scale, which relies on patients observing their stool and subjectively classifying it on their own. This leads to inconsistent measurements across patients, making it hard to understand which treatments work for which types of patients. The resulting data from Bristol surveys are also low-resolution and only measure 1 variable of the stool, instead of detailed measurements of multiple characteristics of the stool.

What?

Today we’re releasing Dieta’s proprietary computer vision technology to the world in our free mobile app (iOS, Android). When patients snap a photo of their stool, our AI will immediately classify 5 objective characteristics of the stool:

1. Consistency: how liquid or solid is the stool?

2. Fragmentation: how divided is the stool into separate pieces?

3. Fuzziness: how clear or fuzzy are the edges of the stool?

4. Volume: how large is the stool?

5. Bristol Scale: defined above - because this is currently the global standard recognized by gastroenterologists and medical institutions such as the FDA, we’ll be measuring it

Patients can view their resulting data in the Dieta Portal to understand which interventions (diets, medication, supplements) are truly helping them or not. They can also share their data with their doctors or dietitians to help them make better treatment decisions (clinicians: sign up here).

Introducing Dieta Self-Experiments

IBS has no universal cure, but it does have hundreds of treatment options. These treatments include diets, medications, supplements, probiotics/antibiotics, and lifestyle changes such as meditation and exercise. For the average IBS patient, it can be overwhelming to research all these options, hear different perspectives from different doctors and clinicians, and decide on a treatment plan for themselves. On top of that, they have to track which treatments they’ve already experimented with, which ones worked, and how their past experiments should influence their future.

At Dieta, we are solving this problem with a data-driven, structured approach that makes the process of managing self-experiments easier for the patient. Today we’re excited to announce our self-experiments feature in the app! Watch a quick 1-minute explainer video below:

Why You Should Photograph 📸 Your Poops 💩

TLDR: We have a crazy request for you: take photos of your poops in the Dieta app! Help us train our artificial intelligence to derive insights about digestive health from poop pics. Let’s get to work: iOS, Android

So why should you take these poop pics? A few good reasons:

1. Help others by advancing science: we’re building the world’s first AI computer vision model for stool. 11% of the global population suffers from Irritable Bowel Syndrome (that’s over 800 million people) and the symptoms can be debilitating. For the average patient, 73 days per year are socially or professionally restricted. At Dieta, we’re building technology to help people improve their symptoms rapidly using data and AI. This computer vision model is a critical piece of that system.

2. Keep track of your poops: if you’re one of those people with IBS, or are just generally trying to improve your digestive health, the Dieta app is the easiest way to keep track of your bowel patterns. You can also track your diet in our app by taking photos of foods (we can already label these for you with AI) and our technology will identify patterns about what triggers or relieves your digestive symptoms.

3. Get insights about yourself: Once we collect enough images to train our AI models, we’ll run those models on all your poop pics. As a result, you’ll get access to these insights. We’ll let you know what your stool suggests about digestive health and what you can learn from others who have similar digestive systems to yours!

Why are we doing this? 

Dieta’s mission is to end digestive suffering. Our way of contributing is by using data and AI to give people the best recommendations to quickly improve their digestive symptoms. To do that, we need to collect data on the inputs and outputs of digestive health for each individual. The inputs are food, drinks, medications, and supplements; the things we put in our bodies and the things we can fully control. The outputs are the results of what we put in our body: bowel movements and digestive symptoms. These are the things we can’t always fully control, but we strive to optimize them with our data-driven recommendations. 

We believe the future of measuring digestive outputs is the stool computer vision model we’re building. Today, gastroenterologists around the world use the Bristol Stool Scale to measure discrete 1-7 values that characterize bowel movements. This outdated method is problematic because it is subjective and provides low resolution data that isn’t very useful (we’ll discuss in our next blog post). Dieta’s computer vision model will produce high-resolution data that is objective and can be comparable across thousands (and one day millions) of patients. 

With the high resolution data we already collect in the Dieta app today, we can build a “bowel movement profile” for each person. These measure 6 characteristics at different times of the day:

Now, instead of just measuring a single 1-7 value, we have hundreds of features on each individual’s digestive health, allowing us to gain deeper insight and provide more personalized recommendations.

How To Do It

1. Take a clear image of the stool in the toilet

2. Log the 2 most important characteristics using the sliders, these are consistency and completeness

For how to navigate the app, check out the following instructional gif: 

Wrapping up

Dieta’s CEO, Asaf, has already photographed 430 of his own poops to contribute to the database (CTO Ben is at 150 works-of-art, his bowels aren’t as crazy as Asaf’s). We hope you’ll have as much fun as we’ve had taking poop pics! 

Questions? Comments? We love hearing from you, email us at hello@bigdieta.com

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