Q. Daniel (Heejae) Park, if you would be so kind as to introduce yourself.
Yes of course. My name is Daniel Park and I am the Founder & CEO of Cardio Health Co. Ltd.(www.cardiohealth.care) and Cardio Healthcare Inc. I have been interested in building things and have been doing so ever since I was young, and that interest has led to me starting my path as a serial entrepreneur. I started my first business since joining the Korea Institute of Machinery & Materials (KIMM) at the National Research Institute at Daedeok Research Complex through the technology patent during my time at university. Prior to founding Cardio Health, I have experience founding two companies, operating them in Korea & Silicon Valley, and then selling them. After those experiences, I joined The Vault SF, a San Francisco-based venture accelerator where my co-founder & I expanded the company into Korea and operated the Korean entity.
Q. Could you speak more to you and your co-founder’s experience at the Silicon Valley accelerator?
While I was supporting Korean startups advance into Silicon Valley with my partners from Silicon Valley KOTRA, I was introduced to The Vault SF, a venture investment firm and accelerator based in San Francisco which is at the heart of Silicon Valley. That’s where I met my current co-founder & COO Michael (Minkyu) Jee who was an officer at The Vault SF. Together we launched the Korean entity, The Vault Korea, at Incheon Global Campus (IGC) located in Songdo to help Korean startups expand efficiently & effectively into the US market through Silicon Valley. The Vault SF headquarters serves as a global incubation platform for talented startups, venture investment, and M&A support for promising companies.
Q. Please introduce Cardio Health.
Cardio Health aims to create a healthy and happy society by solving the problem of excessive financial spending by the government, healthcare, and insurance companies due to increases in medical expenses.
To solve this problem, we provide a proprietary technology and platform that allows you to enjoy exercising in the metaverse and receive Cardiocoin, our native crypto asset that rewards you for your validated exercise data. Our token economy & service will fuse the metaverse and real-world economy.
Q. Were there any similar healthcare blockchain projects prior to Cardiocoin?
Yes, indeed there were. At the same time as the blockchain industry began, there were many attempts to collect and tokenize individual exercise information. Undoubtedly, virtual assets, one of the core properties of blockchain, were used as a medium to transact by converting human behavior into tokenized data. There have been many similar projects because of the rapid applicability to the insurance industry & healthcare marketing sectors.
From what I recall, when the blockchain industry was growing quickly in 2018, there were many projects that rewarded exercise with virtual assets using smartphones or fitness trackers as the medium of data collection. Fast forward to now, most of those projects have been shut down. I think the core reason lies in the overuse of unreliable (unverified) exercise data and the resulting decrease in value due to the inflation of virtual assets from unvalidated issuances. To put it simply, people were receiving virtual assets without really exercising by putting their Fitbit on their dog’s collars or on a rotating fan or just by shaking their smartphones. Hence, there were no demanders or buyers of such tokenized exercise data because it was unreliable.
Q. So, how is Cardio Health different from previous “similar” projects?
Cardio Health’s approach is very different. We only collect actual exercise data and focus on increasing the reliability of the data so that data consumers (such as insurance companies, healthcare companies, and others) can purchase our virtual assets with confidence.
At the beginning of Cardiocoin, many people were puzzled by the fact that a blockchain project was developing IoT & AI sensors for fitness equipment. Some people seemed to think it was strange that we were not developing a mainnet, not going the e-commerce route, or developing a wallet technology, but rather, creating sensors for treadmills and indoor bicycles as a validator to provide virtual assets to reward exercise.
Now, many people understand our project. If you tokenize exercise data of the 500 million global users of exercise equipment (treadmills & indoor bikes) and build a reliable data-based token economy, it is now very apparent that this can become a huge business opportunity.
In order to make this distinction, we have developed and commercialized hardware sensor and software technology that determines whether the user is exercising by machine learning various kinds of vibrations generated from user exercise on fitness equipment. Our patents are registered in the United States, United Kingdom, China and of course, here in Korea, and we are proud to say we won the 2020 Korea Patent Grand Prize. Even more important than the technology, Cardio Health provides real motivation for exercise by integrating the user’s exercise with a large content library of fun games, OTT, fitness content, real-world simulations, and metaverse platforms such as Roblox.
Q. What kind of service is Cardio Health’s metaverse?
Many companies are entering the metaverse space, because it is a basic technology that makes innovation faster by removing the obstacles of time and space related to work, play, and socializing, in turn, allowing people to meet at any time in the meta space.
Cardio Health is convinced that metaverse is a great innovation opportunity to solve the problems of sports and physical education that were difficult to do because of such constraints.
In particular, Cardio Health has defined metaverse as a space for new sports and is systematically preparing its business to reflect that belief. In sports management, the three elements of sports are defined as 1) exercise, 2) fun, and 3) competition. Existing exercise with fitness equipment such as a bicycle at a fitness center or at home could not be called a sport because there was no competition and not much fun.
On the other hand, Cardio Health is providing a platform for metaverse sports by allowing users to play games and enjoy exercise content while competing with the global userbase all while riding our Metabike or using other products in our ecosystem. Cardio has over 50 games & contents from the world’s greatest production studios (with over 1.4 billion downloads globally) loaded onto our Cardio HUB platform (think of it as the Netflix of Exercise). As such, the Cardio metaverse is used to provide an environment where users can really enjoy their exercise and voluntarily want to exercise more.
Q. If only fitness equipment equipped with Cardio’s technology can be used, wouldn’t the rate of market expansion be quite slow?
Yes, this is a question we get a lot from investors. In short, we are not a company that produces and distributes fitness equipment. We provide the necessary sensors (treadmill IoT sensor & indoor bike IoT pedal) and parts (game-controller integrated indoor bike handles) that attach to the multitude of existing ODM/OEM products that fitness equipment companies produce & distribute. They apply our technology to their existing products (easily installable) so that they can manufacture and distribute Cardio powered fitness equipment with metaverse gaming and healthcare data collection functionality. Our current market expansion strategy is to provide these products to consumers quickly through contracts and partnerships with the largest sports equipment manufacturers & distributors in Korea, and soon globally. Cardio has already signed a contract with the largest ODM fitness equipment manufacturer & distributor to execute this plan.
Q. How do you expect the blockchain industry to develop in the future?
It is a long time ago, but even in the late 90s and early 2000s, the infrastructure industry for internet networks started to develop rapidly. Following such development leading the infrastructure industry (i.e. optical communication networks and mobile communication operators) there was a boom in the service industry which created an environment in which data could be transmitted quickly. Services such as Google, Amazon, Netflix, and Facebook as we know them today have developed after the proactive completion of the Internet network infrastructure industry.
I think that the blockchain industry will be the same as the development of the internet industry. If blockchain infrastructure platforms such as Ethereum and Solana that provide dApp development and blockchain environments using smart contracts are considered well-enough established, I think that even more services will grow on top of those protocols. I also think that services tangential to real-life, such as NFTs & validated Move-to-Earn based on USDT and ERC721, will lead the future of the blockchain industry.
We are confident that Cardio will also become the most used blockchain service in the healthcare field. Cardiocoin, a virtual asset that enables exciting exercise in Metaverse, reliable exercise data collection using artificial intelligence technology starting from the IoT level, and data providers and consumers to freely trade such tokenized data, will become a direct marketing channel for the healthcare industry acting as a bridge to fitness users. It will save insurance premiums, preventable medical expenses, and create a healthy and enjoyable personal life.
Q. What is Cardio’s global strategy?
Cardio Health’s global strategy lies in our team’s global career and network. Co-founder & COO Michael Jee grew up in Silicon Valley from a young age, graduated from UC Berkeley, and has a history of working in Silicon Valley technology companies (strategy) and investment firms (VC and M&A). As a Wall Street attorney from Stanford University and formerly director at Blackrock, the world’s largest asset management company, Kevin Smith brings his vast cross-border professional experience to Cardio as a director. And as a member of Mensa Global, I have tapped into that global network of the brightest minds from Silicon Valley and Korea to secure talented manpower for the growth of Cardio. We continue our experience of growing a global company together at Cardio Health after many years of working together at The Vault.
As proven with many other businesses, in order to become a top player in the global market, I believe that probability of success drastically increases when we prove ourselves and our products & services in Silicon Valley with backing from top investors and partners.
Q. What does Cardio’s roadmap look like?
Last year we installed our B2B products (treadmill IoT system) and operated these services for fitness centers & gyms. We have already serviced 15,000 people in 20 fitness centers, and more than 2,500 active members are using our service with 95% satisfaction despite the COVID19 pandemic. While operating our fitness center BETA service for about 8 months, we have verified 42,035 Km of distance exercised through 24,948 workouts over 7,168 hours, and rewarded Cardio users with Cardio Points worth about almost $10,000 USD.
In May of this year, our B2C product (Metabike : P2E & M2E metaverse gaming home fitness bike) will be released and sold globally. In early 2023, we believe that the COVID19 situation will become more stable, and my team and I are preparing for market expansion into Silicon Valley to spur the success of our global business.
Q. Lastly, would you like to say something to the readers?
Although the most basic of facet business is that a company turns a profit, our team has been striving to create a business model in which all members of the world we live in can also reap great rewards while the company generates revenue. At this point in time, many government-led (or at least government interest aligned) blockchain projects can be expected to participate in the field of ESG. National governments’ growing medical expenses, worsening due to the increase in preventable disease and the underlying problem with population structures, can be eased with exercise & diet which is the basis of preventive medicine, and it is with this belief that Cardio been working tirelessly to bring the future of fitness to the world.
Please support Cardio Health. We are now at the final stages of completing Metabike B2C product and service development (with a full launch of our Metarun B2B product and service as well). And don’t forget to take an interest in Cardiocoin. The more people that become aware of our mission and show interest, the faster we can create a fun & healthy society through metaverse & gaming integrated exercise that utilizes blockchain to reward your hard-earned fitness. Please stay tuned for more exciting news from Cardio, and thanks for reading!
