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Tom Hale

President at Momentive, the maker of SurveyMonkey and GetFeedback, and the leader in agile experience management company. Shape what's next at momentive.ai

Tom Hale is a highly experienced Senior Operator with a track record of scaling high-growth companies ranging from 200 to 2000 employees. He has a diverse skill set spanning across Product, Development, UX, Strategy, Marketing, Operations, and Finance. With a focus on Customer Centric product leadership, Tom has successfully built businesses in various sectors including Travel, Media, Collaboration, FinTech, and Ecommerce. Additionally, he serves as a Public company Board Member, Investor, and advisor. Tom pursued his education by completing a BA at Harvard University and studying at The Thacher School.

Highlights

Aug 18 · linkedin

Despite innovations in treatments, heart disease has been the leading killer of Americans for decades and continues to be the leading cause of death globally. It can be challenging to spot because it presents in a variety of ways—including things like coronary heart disease, heart attacks and strokes, chronic kidney disease, and other conditions—making it difficult for people to understand the state of their heart health before it’s too late.

We launched our first heart health features—Cardiovascular Age and Cardio Capacity—earlier this year for this exact reason. These features are designed to combine information about estimated arterial stiffness and VO2Max to give Oura Members an indication of their cardiovascular health today and a look into how that might impact them in the future. This is a unique perspective in wearables today.

That’s what we mean when we talk about Oura Ring as a “personal health companion.” Health is not just one aspect of your life. That’s why we aim to support our members’ health holistically across a range of needs, with the understanding that each part of a person’s physiology is inextricably intertwined and no two people are the same.

Health is not a one-size-fits-all proposition. While medicine is practiced on the average, we want to empower patients and clinicians (and the software that supports them) to understand health on a personal and individualized level. Oura Advisor, which learns and remembers what you tell it, is one small (large?) step in this direction.

Oura has the power to follow patterns and learn about you in a way that can help inform your behaviors today and predict how things might go for you in the future. We’re building the most scientifically validated smart ring that will support our members today and for a lifetime.

#withoura

Jun 21 · linkedin

Oura’s Cardiovascular Age feature has been out in the wild for a few weeks now, and already the feedback and learnings we’ve seen from the community are incredible. So far, we’ve learned that the majority of Oura members – nearly 80 percent – have circulatory systems that are aligned with their chronological age. No matter where you fall, our mission is to articulate what it means, why it matters and help people understand what they can do with this information because it’s changing all the time.

So how do we measure CVA? Oura Ring uses infrared photoplethysmography (PPG) sensors to estimate your pulse wave velocity (PWV), or the speed at which your heartbeat pulse travels throughout your body, the widely used gold-standard measurement of arterial stiffness.  As arteries stiffen, the speed at which your blood flows through them (PWV) speeds up.

Pauli Ohukainen, is one of our research scientists who helps to distill this amazing science down into simple terms. He explains the arteries as shock absorbers. The large arteries of the body work to cushion the pressure waves generated by the heart, while the smaller arteries are not designed to handle such high forces. As large arteries stiffen, they lose their cushioning ability, and smaller arteries in sensitive organs, such as the brain, kidneys, and the heart itself, become subjected to increased physical strain.

Advanced arterial stiffness can lead to increased risk for several cardiovascular diseases including heart disease, stroke, and heart failure. Plus, it can be a contributor to other illnesses, such as kidney disease and Alzheimer’s disease.

We think of PWV measurements as being where HRV was 10 years ago. It’s lesser known but I think we’re going to start seeing it everywhere as a strong indicator of cardiovascular health.

So what’s the good news? At Oura, we build our features to be compassionate and empowering. CVA is a metric you can change with behavior modifications - and they’re more simple than you might think. Regular exercise, healthy diet, avoiding smoking and heavy drinking are all causally related to slower cardiovascular aging.

CVA is a game changer in wearables when it comes to unlocking real insights into how we’re aging. We’re pushing the category forward and doing right, with the science to back us up.

#WithOura

Tom Hale
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Location

San Mateo, California, United States