Vori Health
Vori Health is a medical company that treats musculoskeletal (MSK) conditions through an integrated model of care. I served as the Chief Design and Experience Officer on this zero-to-one startup. The scope of my work shaped the end-to-end customer journey, which included the service, brand, product, and innovation.
We had a unique opportunity to advertise the business during a Montel Williams-hosted talk show. I included a 30-second and 60-second video bumper that could be aired between segments and at the show's end. Producing this content would enable reusable assets in marketing comms on various channels. It was an excellent orchestration exercise in bringing a group of people together to deliver something visually interesting with a compelling narrative and upbeat soundtrack that explains why you could benefit from the service.
Gamifying the work
For some people, sticking with their care plan required a different kind of carrot. We experimented with a unique motion capture scenario that reverse-targeted the end-user-predicted position based on the picture's angle, position, zoom, and dimensions. We approximated where the pose would land to trigger the award. This complex set of parameters juxtaposed several machine-learning methods and predictive modeling algorithms. The system was challenging to train but rewarding to work on as it gave me insight into how computer vision, motion capture, and tracking models can be improved to drive engagement.
Creating these engaging and beneficial asynchronous therapies aimed to help our team develop clinical pathways that offered modifications tailored to a patient’s preferences. When patients participate in the decisions about their care, outcomes are better. What I sought to do at Vori was to enable a corpus of options that patients could select from to customize their care plans.
Personal Movement Coach
One of our biggest challenges was to increase adherence rates to improve outcomes and overall long-term health goals. We learned that people needed a social component that served as both an accountability coach and a workout buddy. Casting, scripting, styling, directing, and filming actors was a tenuous and expensive endeavor. I decided to experiment with building a generative 3D avatar platform that would enable customization of the environment, personas, and outfits. To set out to execute this direction, we found a skilled 3D modeler who built a rig; then, we created a toolchain that enabled AI motion tracking and motion capture that animated the rig. We tested a variety of compositions and landed on a system that allowed us to generate a style gan and format to apply to hundreds of exercises. This system was infinitely more flexible, allowing us to do 360s, change camera angles to focus on the target muscle groups, render multiple angles we could use for cutaways, and other editing techniques to demonstrate better, instruct, and inform patients throughout their treatment. Furthermore, we could swap out the personas and have fun with their outfits.
Synchronous movement therapy
Our integrated care plan included group classes as we found that the sense of belonging to a community was a critical component of recovery and wellness. Fortuitously, the company was founded at the beginning of the pandemic, and we could not hold in-person classes. As a thought experiment, we held Zoom classes for our patients only to discover that people are camera shy. It was difficult to gauge the engagement during the classes and we explored a virtual environment that allowed people to show up as an avatar. By enabling people to join our online classes as avatars, more people were willing to allow their webcams to be on while working out in the group setting. The movement data from the class setting was useful as we were able to compare movement data from private workouts with social workouts and assess the efficacy of our multimodal approach.