Startup Spotlight: Driftline

Startup Spotlight is an interview series where we ask health, fitness, and wellness startups that use Terra, to share their wisdom from their journey to success and where they see fitness data going in the future.

In this spotlight, we connected with Steinar Agnarsson, Co-founder, and CTO of Driftline, an Icelandic company that has created the first scientifically based measurement of endurance.

What is Driftline?

Driftline is an Icelandic company that is building an innovation that's based on a new understanding of the human heart rate curve, meaning how your heart rate behaves during exercise. We are essentially building the future of fitness analytics by breaking down endurance into a single number. So traditionally, to measure someone's fitness, you would use these standard protocol tests that are either exhausting, expensive, or both - we would have them go for a comfortable run for let's say, 20 or 30 minutes using only a wearable heart rate monitor and get even more accurate results.

What my dad and co-founder, Agnar Steinarsson, had figured out is that there are these simple and beautiful equations that describe exactly the behavior of the heart rate curve that have never been published or seen before. Essentially, there has never been anything like this that fully explains everything in detail about the heart rate curve. Our discovery is significant because the three main parameters that control the heart rate curve actually represent something very meaningful and useful - they represent your maximum heart rate, maximum power output, and a new phenomenon that we're simply calling "Endurance".

We at Driftline believe that Endurance is the missing link in exercise science, and we have the first scientifically based measurement of it. You know, if you ask a person, how high is your endurance? Today that doesn't have a straightforward quantified answer, and people don't know how to answer it. They might start answering in terms of VO2 Max or other similar numbers, but none of those numbers has ever truly represented endurance.

How did you turn it into a company?

Driftline is a company that I and my father, Agnar Steinarsson, started five years ago. The idea was originally developed by my father, he actually came up with all these ideas about twenty years ago in Iceland. Besides having a successful career as a marine biologist and fisheries scientist, my father was an active runner and a running coach, and he has tested various metrics related to heart rate. He surrounded himself with a lot of unique data during his running career and he started tinkering with a lot of ideas, but twenty years ago, it was pretty hard to make use of this kind of data in a meaningful way. However, more recently, with the advent of wearable technology and heart rate monitors, we noticed a business opportunity, and about five years ago we realized a way to make use of this type of data.

Driftline is the first scientifically based measurement of endurance

I was finishing up my computer science degree in Iceland and as part of my final thesis, I figured that I could pick up my father's work by starting to develop new solutions and ideas around this topic. So we developed a small app, like a prototype of what we are doing now. Shortly afterward we got two funding grants in Iceland and thus, we decided to start a company together. For the first two and a half years, I and my dad were just doing this alone, but after we got some larger grants from the Icelandic Research Institute we finally had money to hire more people to our team. So we thought, who would be the most perfect person for us to hire using this money? We landed on Arnar Pétursson who is a 53 times national running champion in Iceland. He is also the most popular running coach in Iceland - you can say he is the running guy in Iceland.

It made a lot of sense to hire Arnar as our software has everything to do with running. The interesting thing is that it turned out that Arnar was actually actively looking for a way to quantify how fit runners were as he was training a lot of people both remotely and in person, and up to that point he would have to estimate their speed thresholds and fitness levels by using his own knowledge and expertise. It turned out Arnar was a perfect match for us and the other way around.

Could you explain the details behind this breakthrough endurance measurement?

One of the main parameters that Driftline provides is what we call "The Runscore", a revolutionary new concept. Up until this point, there hasn't been any way to compare athletes in a meaningful way. For instance, how would you compare Usain Bolt with maybe Eliud Kipchoge? They're both world-class runners, but one of them is a marathon runner while the other is a sprinter. So how would you compare them? Today, it's really hard to measure and compare athletes across different disciplines, such as Jakob Ingebrigtsen, Lionel Messi, or any other athlete. They're different types of athletes. So, for example, if Usain bolt were to use our technology, we might detect that he has a very high maximum speed and very low endurance since his muscles are mostly made up of powerful yet inefficient, fast-twitch muscle fibre. On the other hand, Eliud Kipchoge has a substantially lower maximum speed than Bolt but close to 100% endurance, meaning that his muscles consist mostly of less powerful, but highly efficient, slow-twitch muscle fibre. However, even though these athletes are polar opposites, they can now be easily compared as they would both get a world-class Runscore of close to 10. These two parameters, endurance and max speed, actually dictate running performance over any distance and can be detected by our technology during a short and easy run. No exhausting tests or sprinting is needed.

Driftline can detect what kind of athlete you are just by measuring you when you go out for a simple run

Driftline can detect what kind of athlete you are just by measuring you when you go out for a simple run. Are you a natural sprinter or more suited for longer distances? Or maybe somewhere in between. Driftline takes out the guesswork and tells you exactly where you stand on the speed-endurance spectrum. It also shows you the most optimal way for you to improve.

The Runscope is a combination of both endurance and max speed, which means world-class athletes such as Kipchoge could score 10, most national champions probably around 9.5, elite runners 9.0, and Premier League players perhaps between 8 and 9. An average person might have a Runscore of somewhere in the range of 6–7. This is super interesting as it is the first time you can compare athletes and regular people across sports and disciplines in a very cheap and easy way. So we think the Runscore will be the main fitness number of the future because it's an easy way to compare anyone.

What have been the biggest challenges so far in your journey?

A big challenge for us was gathering data as we needed very specific data that followed exactly our protocols such as maintaining a constant speed for a certain amount of time and perhaps you need to stop at the end and track your recovery heart rate curve. So most of our data, to begin with, consisted of me and my dad measuring these things ourselves and our family around us and reaching out to sports teams. Essentially it was a lot of hard work getting access to this type of data. For a long period of time, we mostly had the theoretical infrastructure of our product with all the equations and models, but we hadn't really tested it out as we wanted because we didn't have access to big data sets. From the beginning, I knew that we needed to get some activity data from all these different wearables and companies, so I started out doing some of them myself.

For example, I connected to the Polar API, Garmin API, and Apple Health API kit. However, these connections weren't super thorough, and they would stop working from time to time, so it was a tedious process to get access to these datasets. Moreover, we needed access to as many wearables as possible for our app to be usable by the market. Doing this by ourselves would have cost us a lot of money and a lot of time. Even after doing that, it probably wouldn't have worked even close to as well as how Terra does it, as you are specialized in this and are executing it perfectly.

So I stumbled across Terra and you have certainly made our lives a lot easier.

Now I can just plug and play your thing into our app, and it just works and solves many problems for us. So it was a relief and a really good feeling when we finally had access to all this data, and the results that came back were amazing.

What will your final product consist of?

Our final product will be an API that licenses our health and fitness analytics to other companies and apps. The API will receive heart rate and activity data measured during runs, walks, and bike rides, and our software will analyze the data and calculate health and fitness parameters such as the before mentioned endurance, max speed, and Runscore, but also a large number of other important factors such as your maximum heart rate, exercise thresholds, estimated race times, resting metabolic rate and your calorie expenditure. We will also release our app called "Indurance" which will be available on both the App Store and the Play Store. The app will be connected to our API and provide automatic fitness tracking and training plans tailor-fit to your specific capabilities and plans.

What do you think is the future of wearables and health tracking?

I believe wearable health technologies, health tech in general, and fitness analytics will be some of the biggest things in our society going forward.

We have these gigantic sources of data from biomarkers that are detected by millions or even billions of people around the world. They're measuring heart rate, activity data, cadence, and various other things, and it is my opinion that there are so many more things that can be done with this type of data if there was just a more fundamental understanding of the underlying biological systems behind the data.

There has been a lack of understanding of how the heart rate works to extract anything meaningful from it. But now with our new technology, you can get a lot of new information that no one has been able to get before in a very easy way.

I also believe that especially the health and fitness sector is going to move heavily in the direction of personal tracking via wearables, and I can't see any other trajectory for this market than that.