How Hexis puts a wearable nutritionist in your pocket

You probably haven’t heard of Hexis, unless you’re on the PGA Tour or training for the Tour De France. But the nutrition app is bringing AI to the world of athletic fuelling – and it says it can finally make wearable data actionable.

For the uninitiated, Hexis takes athlete training programs and tells you what to eat, and when to eat, to recover from your training sessions and prepare for the next one. You tell it what session you’re doing later, and it will tell you exactly what to eat to be ready.

The company has been working with high-profile members of the PGA Tour, Ryder Cup, World Tour Cycling, as well as rugby teams in the UK.

> What happened when I wore a CGM for 2 weeks

Adding wearable data

Hexis

But the Hexis has recently evolved to work with wearable data, and so it can analyze your training and tweak its fuelling recommendations on-the-fly.

It works with Apple Healthkit right now, so it can read activity and workout data from any compatible wearable (pretty much everything bar Fitbit), and mesh that information with its AI engine.

“Every landmark in nutrition has always been punctuated by tech. So you look at the big breakthroughs, such as understanding fuel sources for exercise activity, this came on the back of new laboratory tech to understand substrate utilization,” said David Dunne, founder of Hexis.

The company uses AI to adapt its nutrition plans to your training schedule, but Dunne says the addition of wearable data is ‘transformational.'

“In terms of understanding an athlete’s fuel requirements, we've automated the process with our engine's algorithms and intelligence," he said.

“But wearable data now helps us look at the recovery period and understand whether you did more or less than what was in your training plan. That has implications for how you recover from the exercise, adapt to it, and then prepare for my next session.”

And for Dunne, this is about turning wearable data into actionable insights.

Closing the loop

Whoop

“I think the biggest thing is about being able to turn your training data into actionable nutrition practices. I have a fundamental belief, which some people might disagree with me on, but I don't think we make our data work hard enough for us," he explained.

“Wearables can show you that you spent 16 minutes in zone 2, provide insights into the intensity and load, as well as identify that you burned “X” energy. But now we can close the loop and say here's how much you should eat to recover,” he continued, "And that’s really making the data actionable for the first time."

And it's not just workout data, and the readouts of performance information that's presented by the likes of Garmin and Whoop after we get back from the gym that Dunne says isn't working hard enough. It's also the growing gamut of companies that use CGMs to offer insights into our eating habits.

“Right now, if somebody puts on a CGM they may not really understand what's going on or be able to make sense of the data, instead they see, ‘I ate this, this went up, this went down.’ But there could be so many factors at play.

Your spike may be because of restricted sleep, not because you ate an orange for breakfast.”

Becoming the Whoop of nutrition

So Dunne believes that the addition of Hexis’ AI insights closes the loop for wearable data and finally makes it actionable in the nutrition space. And the future could be powering some of the top athlete-focused wearables, to close the loop and create even better value for users.

 “We want to grow up to be like Whoop and could be the Whoop of nutrition. That’s a company that resonates really well with me. I'm actually pretty confident we could do some amazing things together in the future and help a lot of people realize their potential.

Right now, Hexis is still working with nutritionists and elite athletes – but with such huge potential to add actionable data to our wearables, it could hold the key to putting a nutritionist in everyone’s pocket.