HITLAB Team • May 20, 2025
Detecting Diseases: Simply Look at Your Smartphone
Medical settings occupy just 1% of our time and space. Although the data generated there is valuable, it remains siloed, intermittent, and unstructured. As long as healthcare is confined to this narrow 1% window, its diagnostic power will stay fundamentally limited.
Life settings make up the remaining 99%. In this much larger observational window, the earliest signs of disease appear—yet are too often missed, even dismissed.
Future health technologies that are able to measure our health from our life settings will unlock insights into human health on a scale of orders of magnitude larger than today.
Doing so will unlock new capabilities in disease detection and drug development. BioTrillion provides a solution that bridges this gap through an innovative digital biomarker platform that requires only the smartphone already in 5 billion hands.
Who Is BioTrillion And How They Advance Healthcare
BioTrillion is a MedtechAI startup on a mission to radically scale healthcare by quantifying human physiology with smartphone technology. The Company has developed a digital biomarker platform, BioEngine4D™ — for earlier disease detection and accelerated drug development. This captures data from life, analyzes it with computer vision AI and generative AI, and applies its health insights back to solutions for life. BioTrillion’s technology can measure relevant signs of disease from subtle spatiotemporal features in a user’s eyes and face using smartphone cameras, which already frequently intersect.
How HealthySelfie™ App Works
The HealthySelfie™ app, which is powered by BioTrillion’s BioEngine4D platform, enables anyone, anytime, anywhere to measure and monitor 10 clinically validated biomarkers from a 10-second face scan—with over 90% average accuracy — from only the smartphone they already own.
The HealthySelfie app is an outcome of innovation at the intersection of three key domains:
- Smartphone: These powerful devices today act as computational augmentation tools for over 5 billion people globally.
- Anatomy: An individual’s eyes and face continuously intersect with smartphone cameras, containing rich health information.
- BioTrillion’s AI: Augments the smartphone’s cameras to visualize and measure finer details down to milli-scale features of an individual’s face. These features contain vital health information that humans cannot see, measure, nor remember.
Stakeholders across the healthcare industry – pharma, payors, and providers – are able to easily implement BioTrillion’s technology platform via API/SDK into the enterprise’s existing mobile app on the smartphone of their customer. This allows healthcare entities to incorporate the HealthySelfie app and its abilities into their existing business models and user journey and integrate it with parallel data sources.
For added privacy and security, the app can process all images locally, so health metrics are extracted without the facial image data ever leaving the smartphone only.
With 91% accuracy backed by seven patents and over 45,000 hours of research and development, HealthySelfie™ is a promising innovation that bridges the gap between AI, bioengineering, and smartphone sensors to bring healthcare directly into people’s hands.
HITLAB Evaluation of the HealthySelfie™ App
Methodology
HITLAB researchers conducted a comprehensive assessment of the HealthySelfie app using a dual-method approach: a heuristic evaluation and a cognitive walkthrough, both carried out from the perspective of clinical users. The heuristic evaluation was guided by Jakob Nielsen’s Ten Usability Heuristics, a globally recognized standard for evaluating user interface design and usability.
The evaluation focused on simulating the real-world experience of two distinct clinician personas:
- A freelance primary care physician (PCP) consulting across multiple hospitals
- A primary care physician managing a private clinic
This approach allowed for a nuanced understanding of the platform’s usability across different clinical workflows and practice environments.
Strengths
- Engaging and Futuristic Design:
The app features an intuitive interface with a visually appealing color scheme and 3D design elements that appear modern and engaging. These elements not only make the platform easy to navigate but also sustain user interest, even among returning users.
- Intuitive and Efficient Workflows:
The app offers clearly defined steps for capturing measurements, reviewing results, and accessing interpretive insights, making the overall experience streamlined and user-friendly.
- Clear Instructional Guidance:
Users are provided with straightforward, easy-to-follow instructions for performing face scans, helping to reduce errors and promote confidence in the scanning process.
Detailed and Informative Results:
Results are presented with clarity, indicating whether readings fall within high, low, or normal ranges. The accompanying textual explanations help users understand the implications of their results without requiring clinical interpretation.
Recommendations
To further strengthen the app’s usability and clinical value, HITLAB proposes the following enhancements
Comprehensive Scanning Instructions:
Incorporate detailed in-app guidance for conducting optimal face scans to reduce reliance on clinicians’ memory or verbal instructions.
Actionable and Complete Reports:
Expand the downloadable PDF reports to include relevant patient demographics such as BMI, age, gender, and lifestyle factors. This integration will consolidate key information in one place, reducing the need for clinicians to cross-reference external records.
Enhanced 3D Visuals:
Add brief, explanatory labels to the colored regions on the 3D diagrams to clarify what each patch represents. This added context will improve user understanding and increase the educational value of the visuals.
Future Potential & Key Takeaways
BioTrillion represents a compelling glimpse into the future of healthcare—delivered through a remarkably simple and non-invasive process: a 10-second face scan. Leveraging AI technology and the ubiquity of smartphones, BioTrillion’s platform enables accessible, affordable, instant and private health monitoring, especially for high-risk individuals. Importantly, the app ensures user privacy by keeping facial image data securely stored on the user’s own device.
“With continued refinement and thoughtful integration into healthcare systems, BioTrillion is well-positioned to become the epitome of futuristic early disease detection and accelerated drug development —empowering consumers and clinicians to prevent illness, intervene early, develop drugs, and drive improved health outcomes.”
— Stan Kachnowski, Chair, HITLAB
By incorporating HITLAB’s recommendations, BioTrillion is poised to enhance HealthySelfie’s user experience and expand BioEngine4D’s clinical applications. Its ability to enable health monitoring, streamline clinical workflows, and equip patients with meaningful, real-time insights positions it as a powerful innovation in the dynamic and fast-growing digital health landscape.
The future of health monitoring may already be in your hands.
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