LifeBio’s Beth Sanders on AI Reminiscence Therapy & Winning SBIR Grants | The AgeTech Podcast S5E13

Keren Etkin: Beth, welcome to the show.

Beth Sanders: Thank you for having me, Keren. I admire you

Keren Etkin: Thank you.

Beth Sanders: and I’m glad I’ve gotten to meet you in person and I can’t wait to come visit you in Israel someday.

Keren Etkin: Thank you. Thank you so much. And thank you for joining me on the show today. So I’ve been following your work for quite some time, for years. I, I feel like it’s been years. And I wondered if you could share with us your origin story and what made you start Life Bio.

Beth Sanders: So what happened for me was I was a English and journalism graduate of, of university, and I had come home to my hometown and my grandma lived in our backyard a little like mother-in-law suite, you know, grandma Suite, outback, and. During the dinner one night, I noticed that she was remembering this or that as well as she used to.

And, and I could see her memories slipping a little bit. So I think it was the next day I said to mom, mother, where are, when are we going to tell grandma’s life story? And she said. You should do it. Here’s the tape recorder. Go, go talk to grandma. And you, you tell her story. I remember thinking that I am afraid I don’t know what to ask her.

And more comfortable interviewing the police chief or a fire chief than I am my own grandmother. You know, I don’t know what to ask her. What, how do I start? Where do I go? So I asked my mom. She gave me a few little. Ideas, tips, and then went out back to grandma’s house. And of course grandma was absolutely happy to tell her grandchild anything, right? And so we talked about her childhood and she could remember the first airplane she saw and being a one room schoolhouse teacher and just the idea that my grandmother was once a little girl was just a big aha moment for me. And then she actually could describe her. Parents and her grandparents to me, which were my great grandparents and my great-great grandparents, and so I, I just left her house.

I, I just felt I, I can still see myself going out in her door just like transformed, like, whoa, that’s incredible. Look at the, like, this, this, this is my grandmother. this is not just any ordinary person. She has done so many things. This is, she’s so remarkable. So the idea to me was, wow, the rich and famous tell their story.

But I hadn’t recorded my grandmother, then this ordinary, extraordinary woman would not have been remembered by her own family. And so I was able to create a book about her that I presented to our whole family actually at her funeral. There we go. There was the first Life Bio, and it took a few years. I decided I wanted to be president of my own company. I knew I had to be passionate about the idea, and that was the thing that stuck. It’s like, well, if I was gonna do something, I have to do something big. You know, even at the beginning, Karen, I was like, oh, it’s gonna be international. You know, it can’t just be even local.

It can’t be even in Ohio. It can’t be in just the United States. It needs to be bigger than that. It needs to be international. So at that time. how are we gonna put this on the web? You know? Then things evolved of course into apps, and so we’ve just kind of changed with the times. It’s funny, I, we just got the fifth edition of the Memory Journal, so we started with like a print. and then life bio dot com was born where people could, you know, type in their answers to these questions. And you know this, like I said, I couldn’t, I couldn’t at the time think, well, what am I gonna ask my grandma? So one of our earliest tasks, my earliest task was what are the questions? In what order?

What categories? So this has like the people who shaped you. The memories like historical events and growing up things. The real world, like jobs, love, marriage, home. Worship children, grandchildren, pets, you know, and then bringing it all together. Family stories and heirlooms, beliefs, opinions, tough questions, lessons through the years in the future.

So not just the past, but the future covered in this too. Anyway, that led, you know that formed the basis what, for what was inside life bio dot com, which then led to us evolving into the Life bio memory app.

Keren Etkin: that is quite, that is quite a remarkable story. And I wonder sort of. You mentioned that you were obviously a, a journalism major, so you knew how to ask questions if you were interviewing, like you said, the police chief.

Okay. But how do you pick and choose which questions do you put in this particular product? Because you do wanna get personal, but you also, I guess, wanna make people comfortable because some people are not comfortable just

Beth Sanders: Yeah.

Keren Etkin: their grandparents per two personal questions.

Beth Sanders: Yes, I, yeah, it was hard because I, I did, there were, you know, there’s were other kinds of things on the market that I looked at and I thought that, well, that’s, that question seems frivolous. You know, I wanted the questions to be important. I mean, also fun to ask, but you know, like some of the things that I find even now, because we just did 43 interviews in one week in North Carolina, people love to talk about a lot of the times their childhood.

They really do. Like, if they can just paint a picture of that place and go tell you about their neighborhood or the home they grew up in, they take you there. It’s so powerful to watch people go there and that, and I watched her go there and multiple times she said, and again, it’s so, it’s just clear that I could see it like it was yesterday.

I can hear it like it was yesterday. So the idea that. Even when people may have mild cognitive impairment or some kind of memory problem that those. Early memories are really formed up really well, and they can, they can go there. So I love the fact that we like to ask a a lot about their parents, grandparents cousins, siblings, you know, all those relationships. I mean, I see it as not only them telling their life story, but we are. Experts in reminiscence therapy, like literally watching people change or come outta their shell, or like I said, go back there. They’re running in the creek as a little girl. They’re playing with their friends again. They’re climbing a tree again, like in their mind. That’s where they are. I like those kinds of questions. I also love to hear, you know, their greatest accomplishments. And sometimes it’s funny, it’s like I’ve asked a CEO that question and it’s like, well. Teaching my grandson to read. It’s like, wow. That’s, yeah. That’s incredible. You know people love talking about their work experience, of course.

And oh, I, I, I, I swear I was talking to a guy that reminded me of, you know, the Andy Griffith show. I don’t know if you’re too young to know that show. But anyway, Andy Griffith you know, he, this, this guy had that beautiful southern, drawl and told me for 20 minutes about all his twisted turns in his career.

I just loved it. You know, what a great story, right? So I, I don’t know if I, you know, it’s, it’s, will always have great advice and a lot of our work. Too in like the retirement communities, it’s in nursing homes and hospice and home care is, well, if you have one hour to talk to someone, what are you gonna get? So question’s a good one. Like, you know, if you only have this much time, what do people, what can they talk about and can they, what will they really enjoy? Staying and I, I think they just really enjoy the relationships of their life and work accomplishments, their childhood, advice. Those kinds of things are essential.

Keren Etkin: Absolutely. So how has the business model evolved over the years?

Beth Sanders: Well, I’ll say at the very beginning we didn’t have a clue what we’re, you know, it was like, wow, we have these books we’re selling and then we have this website and I went to a conference where. I came away and they called me up after the conference and all, you know, and then they said, well, so we’re a retirement community and so you’ll license us to use this across the enterprise, you know, across the community.

Right. So you’ll train us how to do this, will let everyone who wants to do it, do it in our community. Right? That’s how it works. And I was, I remember thinking. Yeah, that’s how it works. What a great idea. Yes, of course. That’s how it works. So, you know, so yeah, today people may spend between, you know, three and $7,000 a year for their whole. community, it could be a home care agency, it could be hospice, it could be retirement living, it could be any, could be a university doing projects with home care. You know, people that live at home or go go to a senior center. So we work with all types of organizations. So it’s, it’s just a license agreement. Came from the world of selling software actually in before Life Bio was my. Full-time job. I was selling tech and selling Microsoft software agreements. So to me it was like, oh yeah, it’s just a software agreement. And, and so it, it renews annually, you know, they pay monthly or annually for it. And we have some consumer

I’m.

what primarily B2B and. And continue to be that. So we work with like chains, like life care services. We work with the Mayo Clinic. During COVID, I, we, we built a phone-based version of this basically that we did some cool stuff with United Healthcare with. And I still think there’s more things we could be doing with the health insurers and that kind of thing going forward too.

Keren Etkin: There’s always, there’s always more to do. So let’s, let’s talk about funding. You had quite a unique funding journey. Could you tell us a little bit more about that?

Beth Sanders: yeah. So the very beginning, and we just invested our own funds in it. Just my husband and I have both been involved. I, I happen to be married to a brilliant programmer. That is really a nice. Thing. So our early days between the two of us, we could usually get things started. And then over time we had attracted an angel investor in San Francisco. He was his name’s Gordon Bell and he was our first investor. And it’s, it’s funny, I found him reading our email newsletter. So just interesting how like our email newsletter led to meet and wonder who is this? Person, Gordon Bell and I had emailed him and said, I would to tell you more about Life Bio. Because online you could find a port profile of him. He’s now passed away and this, but he had invested in like a hundred companies, so I thought, why not? So one day I asked him if I could talk to him someday and within, I dunno, within that half an hour, we were on a web meeting like this and I was pitching Life bio to him and loved it because he had.

In his career predicted things like Facebook were going to happen. So he was so interested in like people chronicling, remembering their memories, you know, or capturing their memories, right? So it just aligned. Good. So if we can find a, good angel like that, who’s really aligned with what we’re doing, that is. Amazing. So so within, you know, basically we were wired the money from our first angel investor and he was in California and he said, now go back to Ohio and find investors locally who will support you too. So within two weeks I was. Pitching at Ohio State. ’cause I’m in central Ohio at a, at a pitch event and up comes a guy named Ray Sheeley, who is our second angel investor. And, and he was, he’s amazing. He’s so helpful. I just interviewed his mom recently for with Life Bio, which is cool. then he brought. It’s some more of his friends on board. So anyway, it’s long story short, you know, one angel led to another and we have a, a small group of angels. And now over the years we’ve, we’ve tried and done a lot of the, you know, done the different VC kinds of.

Pitches and that we’ve been, we’re part of Startup Health, I recommend highly. That’s a great organization. I, I have to give a huge thanks to Mary Furlong for her events, which bring us together with the investor world. And so. All of those things, but I, no, we did not go the VC round, but at one of Mary Furlongs events, I happened to meet Todd Ham from the small business innovation, research grants at the NIH, which is, you know, the, anyway, the National Institute on Aging is part of the NIH I met with Todd at Mary Furlongs event, and that was a light bulb moment. I thought, let’s apply for this. So we had applied, believe it or not, right before COVID. So was, I met, I don’t know, right? Yeah. Anyway, we won our first phase two SBIR grant in July, 2020. And that was a two and a half million dollar, you know, three year. Grant non-dilutive funds to basically take what we had built with Life Bio and established already and, and move it to a cool new app that would voice record.

So we were still in the world of people typing their memories or handwriting their memories. And this grant allowed us to incorporate AI and voice recording by. Literally only a year later, we were wearing masks in nursing homes, interviewing people with the, the newest version of the Life Bowel Memory app. and it’s, I was just gonna show you like a, I’ll just pop it up here so you can, you know, see it So, you know, they see a, they see a question in the app, and then we just click to record, that. There you go. You know, it’s that, and then you just go to the next question. So it was like, oh my goodness.

The, you couldn’t imagine. I think I shed tears, you know, and I saw, oh, I, we have invented the modern day tape recorder. It, it tells us what to ask, and then it lets me record. So. It just make, it just opens up the world of possibilities. You know, people can capture their care and phone preferences, you know, their children, they, there’s all kinds of different topics they can cover. So if somebody ask them about their childhood memories and they say, I was in Vietnam, and they wanna talk about military, you can jump right to that topic. It’s just, I, I got my heart’s desire of what needed to be built, and then AI

Finally

it and then we’re making books out of it. So at the end of the process, they actually get a book out of the end. So, and, and a

that’s

they are so people know how to care for them. Okay.

Keren Etkin: That is awesome. So an SBIR phase two grant, that is one of the bigger grants. What did you have to have? Included in your application to, in order to get that.

Beth Sanders: Well, it’s clear that you have to have a great research strategy. So we worked with the Benjamin Rose Institute on Aging and we had over a hundred people in nursing homes and the staff members who were being surveyed. me back up. The first phase, ’cause you have to define your aims very specifically in AIM one, we were building the prototype and then. It had to be shown, and again, we’re doing this during COVID, so we had people living with mild cognitive impairment and their caregiver on Zoom hearing about this app and giving feedback on this app or, also they had it in like in hand and they were giving feedback, so I, I think it’s just incredible that our focus group where people living with. Cognitive impairment or dementia and, and their caregivers. So that was part of the grant, that we don’t just build it we, we ask, is this right? And their feedback was really helpful and helped us change you know, like they, they would say things were confusing about the setup. I, here’s an interesting thing from them. So we’ve, we’ve figured out like they were, who’s logging in? Am I logging in ’cause I’m the caregiver or the, the, the person’s logging in. So it actually helped us figure out, like in the world of senior living or home care or hospice, right? It’s like. kind of like when you get on a plane and they say, okay, put your mask on first and now help someone else. So that became how our registration had to happen, right? are you? Who are you? You log yourself in who is the storyteller? Okay, so. valuable was that to get that feedback from the focus group? They’re like, I’m a, I’m a staff member. Am I logging in? I’m not the one telling my story. You know, and, and to clarify all that through that process. with, with Benjamin Rose, they helped us do that focus group and get all the feedback and then they also helped getting that in the hands and, and tracking. Depression levels and, you know, feelings of purpose and meaning subjective wellbeing, that kind of thing prior to and after. So we found that we reduced, we reduced depressive symptoms by 15% and the people who participated, so, and the staff got to know these people.

Much better as a result. So they were reporting, really understanding people they’re caring for. So that base, that research then helped us with a phase two B, which we have just recently won. phase two got done was successful. Data is published on our research [email protected], then we are moving on to phase two B in this case. We’re working with George Mason University and we are going to be using it in in community, like community dwelling individuals, not people this time assisted living or memory care or nursing homes. They will be people out in community because we just wanted to focus in on that home care. And how useful it could be to relieve the caregivers and to build out more the reminiscence therapy.

So cognitive games, and other things to compliment the personalization of knowing the person’s story. Now, how can we take that even further in delivering care to that person living at home? Does that make sense?