Dr. Royan Kamyar is Pioneering the Perfect Day

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• Tara Vatandoust

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• Catherine Poland- [email protected]

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• Magazine
• Profile
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Dr. Royan Kamyar, MBA '10, is the CEO and founder of health and wellness technology company Owaves. Its goal is to help people utilize their circadian rhythm - the body's natural, internal process that regulates the sleep-wake cycle - to optimize their daily routines and improve their mood and metabolism. Offered through an app, Owaves' program is especially tailored for young adults and college students. Kamyar graduated from the Rady School of Management at UC San Diego, received his medical degree from Baylor College of Medicine in Texas and his bachelor's degree from UC Berkeley. Kamyar's goal is to innovate preventative medicine, a field he's passionate about.

UC San Diego Magazine sat down with Kamyar to discuss his time at UC San Diego and how it inspired him to help people understand their own circadian rhythms through Owaves.

UC San Diego Magazine: Why did you choose the Rady School at UC San Diego?

Royan Kamyar: I grew up in San Diego, and my dream was always to start a health company here. When I left for UC Berkeley for my undergraduate degrees, the business school at UC San Diego didn't exist. But once it was formed in 2001, the Rady School was a great fit for me, right at the intersection of life sciences and entrepreneurship.

UC San Diego Magazine: How did you decide to go into your line of work?

RK: While attending the Rady School, I was looking for entrepreneurial opportunities. During medical training, I realized that the U.S. health care business model prioritizes and incentivizes downstream care: We don't really have a health care system, we have a sick care system. There's very little economic incentive for physicians to prioritize prevention, education and lifestyle medicine. As a result, I became passionate about making a difference in the field of preventative care through modeling the key components of a long, healthy life. When I graduated in 2010, the field of digital health was just emerging, and I saw an opportunity to develop tools that help with preventative care, upstream of disease, using devices that we all now carry with us daily: smartphones and wearables.

UC San Diego Magazine: Tell me more about the importance of understanding our own personal circadian rhythm.

RK: Understanding our own personal circadian rhythms helps us become peak physiological performers. Professional athletes, people who work in special operations, and those who sing or perform professionally are very savvy and aware of things like jet lag, timing of sleep, meals and their performance. Because of that, for example, professional sports teams have sleep coaches. Once you realize that these elite performers who depend on their bodies for their income or their livelihood are the most attuned to the timing of their behaviors, it becomes clear we could all benefit from doing the same at some fundamental level, even if we're not competing in a championship game. Now there's a growing body of evidence that even small chronic circadian disruption over time could be causing a lot of the chronic disease that we see, especially metabolic and mood conditions. That's where a lot of the research on circadian rhythms is going on now. If we're not paying attention to our circadian rhythms, we're not taking care of ourselves.

UC San Diego Magazine: What's something from your time at UC San Diego that still sticks out to you today?

RK: The Rady School has always been very entrepreneurial by encouraging students to explore startups that cross-breed with other departments on campus, such as the engineering and medical schools. I was actively involved in events and competitions offered by the Rady School, which helped me transition from the "white coat" to becoming an entrepreneur after my medical internship. There was definitely a transition period there: learning to embrace risk, appreciating the art of communication, and realizing that relationships are the ultimate drivers of success.

UC San Diego Magazine: What inspires you about the future of health technology?

RK: The big story right now is AI. It's already transforming a lot of what we do. This fall, Owaves is launching BodyClock AI as an app. Our earlier version helped users discover the best times to eat, sleep, exercise and work based on their chronotype. Traditional chronotypes range from "definite evening" (night owls or moonflowers) to "definite morning" (morning larks or morning glories), with three levels in between. AI allows us to exponentially scale personalization from just five chronotypes to over eight billion individuals by integrating wearable activity data, medical history, personal goals and preferences. We're building a unique health and wellness compass for each user - that's the future we're aiming for.

There's a lot of work, investment and money being poured into the four walls of the hospital, which is great. But unfortunately, there's still so much work to be done with preventative health care. Thanks to wearables and digital phenotyping through our devices, which involves using data from our phones to learn more about our behavior and habits, I think the health care industry can create a system or framework to truly measure and reward prevention. I think that's where the future of health care has to go, frankly, from a national economic standpoint, because the trajectory of health care spending is a crisis-level issue. There have to be improvements in how the health care system prevents, treats and manages disease, and I think technology and AI need to play a role.

The BodyClock AI app allows users to set up a personalized 24-hour day plan based on their individual circadian rhythms, blocking out set times for meals, exercise, work and sleep. (Image courtesy of Owaves, Inc.)