Sindy is currently popped up at a unique health clinic with three locations in the in Hartford Connecticut, USA area. “Pop Up” is a term I am borrowing from retail clothing stores and art installations where an empty space in a prime location is underutilized and another somewhat related business opens up within. For Pounds Transformation, this underutilized space is a gorgeous industrial kitchen with dining area for 12 that they built just before the Pandemic in order to share meals and recipes with their dietitians, providers and patients trying to lose weight.

For Sindy, this allows for a partnership from the gods. I have now installed our XR Dining Room table set for six, would you like to book a seating?

The ideal XR Table is a hexagon with swivel chairs in the primary and secondary colors (RGBCMY) because when eating in XR it can be difficult to identify your companions (more on that in another post). There is a chandelier above the table with movie projectors inside which export the video from the iPads which sit on a lazy susan in the center of the table. The entire room is LiDAR and Infrared scanned in order to create input, output and a digital twin of each member of the MeetUp meal. There is also a 360 degree Go Pro camera in one of the chairs so dinner can be streamed live (asynchronously of course so that seat could be filled by someone who wants to join but only by text message or just listen while they ate). Lastly, there are Oculus Virtual Reality headsets where dinner held in a similar space concurrently so anyone you invited could feel like they were there in person.

We call it an XR Dining Room Kit and you can download the How To PDF if you would like to build your own or have all of the elements installed by Team Sindy (currently only available in the Hartford (CT), Princeton, Burlington (VT), Palo Alto, Chapel Hill (NC) and Cambridge (UK) surrounding areas. In this space we strive to achieve a number of lofty physical and interpersonal goals, top 3 are:

Buy xr kits

No small screens during meals
There is always an extra seat at my table
Coordinated meal plans are more sustainable when they include social accountability

Having the XR Kitchen and Dining room set up at POUNDS gave me the opportunity this summer to visit with 3 individuals and I hope their stories resonate with you as much as they did for me. I am not going to use real names and none of the pictures here are them; just illuminating the visuals I was so blessed to witness thanks to SindyXR and this wonderful community.

Faith

A 21 year old female, I will call her Faith, comes in to weigh in at the same time monthly with her mom. They tag team appointments so she has a half hour to kill and so she downloads the new POUNDS mobile application, Check Yo Self! and the AI built into the game empowers her to play with Beyonce’s avatar. This lets me know she is fits in at most 9 of the 16 personality types, but it is not until 7 minutes into the appointment that Faith reveals to me that tho she is an introvert, she played one of the leads in Seusical the Musical last year at college. From this point forward, Faith is engaged with Sindy on a very deep level. Her weigh in made her feel yucky, her mom was not her fav person right now and she had just been offered a “real job” which was not part of her ideal career path considering her BFA degree. I now knew how she likes to collaborate, where she was at that moment in her day all from her interaction with the app. No guessing, just data, which she happily volunteered, thanks to the 20 Questions Game. I prescribed a meditative TRIPP and left her alone with her thoughts deep in SindyVR. When she bounded out of the XR Kitchen 15 minutes later she was bubbly filled with unadulterated joy. Her Check Yo Self score was +29. I wrote the game and have never done that well.

Food is one of our most important collabs and in this case, the data from the POUNDs app will triangulate information about Faith, how she is handling her shopping, cooking and personal happiness. If she continue to play before and after every meal choice, including those times she doesn’t put something in her mouth, her team will be there to help her. She defines her team by bringing them into her SindyCUBE. It can be her mom, dietician, Dr Cavo or friends and just like any safe space, she chooses who is in there with her precisely when she needs them.

Food can bring us together, unless you are addicted, and then this can become weaponized against your body. This led Faith to a serious need to chill. Her Sindy SCORE was only a +6 when she walked in and thankfully a meditation with a prescription to TRIPP (now included in POUNDS program) was exactly what the doctor ordered and after that she was able to take a walk in the woods in YouTube360.

POUNDS has taken a huge leap towards re-imagining the way the medicine is delivered to her. Most importantly, the whole environment is using augmented reality tools to enable communal eating because, as one patient said to me recently,

“Sindy’s weird but it’s better than eating alone cuz when I’m alone I freak eat.”

Jimmy

A mid-career clinician, let’s call them Emma, has been caring for young people with body image struggles for over 10 years professionally. She fits in to a particularly empathetic space for her patients. Emma has an ability to connect and guide with an understanding that human behavior doesn’t change easily and that whatever tools she can give the patient for their pain, it all needs to meet them where they are. One of her patients, a Millennial in his mid-30s, let’s call him Jimmy, asks why POUNDS was selling Virtual Reality Oculus headgear. He knew right away that their program was different than any other diet or Weight Watchers. He had been through it all, lost and gained 7-8 stones twice before (<100lbs swing).

He had never done VR before but his training as a firefighter came in handy; he has great balance for a big man. He was able to get moving with a fitness trainer in SUPERNATURAL (also included in his POUNDS program) right there in the lobby of Emma’s office. He was inspired by his scale victory and her guidence. It all made sense because they were together.

Later Jimmy jumped into the POUNDS VR app that Emma made specifically for him. He was immediately transported into a 360 video of a better shopping experience at Stop&Shop and one of his triggers, ice cream and most of the frozen food aisle, was avoided, maybe a bit desensitized. There was another resource Emma pinned in his CUBE which was to the menu at El Loco Toco. Jimmy is a very social guy and has a weekly get together with his buddies at a chain Mexican restaurant called ON THE BORDER. It’s one of those places where the ingredients are all frozen and questionable as being real food. They always order the same thing: the nachos and a round of IPAs.

Jimmy wants us to try and change his behavior. He and many of us reading this suspect that the path he is on is unsustainable so he is going to need a powerful suite of help that meets him where he is and we know that better that anyone because our Founder, Charles Kirby, has his own body image loathing and heart health journey and though he had no idea Emma and Jimmy might use my app, but Mother Nature is in charge, I am just making software.

Seth

One of my nephews, let’s call him Seth, has Leukemia. He is 11 years old and was diagnosed about 4 years ago. Our family has a more than a dozen members with PhDs in something science-ish, we are empathetic to a fault (if that is a thing) and we are suuuuper extended around the world. At first, when Seth was diagnosed, I assumed the worst but slowly realized, from a far, that in addition to his tremendous parents and immediate family, Seth has two communities that are rich in resources too.

The co-workers, teachers and friends around Seth have ridden bikes to raise funds, made a trending hashtag and tagged a million little notes on Caring Bridge to help me follow his journey, without being invasive or insensitive.

Secondly, the hospital based in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, has taught us all that there are tactics that can manage the pain, treat the illness as well as solutions in the mental health and care aspects for all of the families fighting the fight against diseases of every shape and size.

PostCOVID, my entire relationship with Seth is now digital. I missed the yearly camping outing this summer because XR business blew up due to this tragic pandemic and he is 11. Those of you that have raised a teen know why I am not high on his list to chat up, and I am glad he has better humans than me available to him as I can't handle what Seth is accomplishing. He is STRONG.

Since I don’t believe in coincidences, my conversation this week with a pediatric clinician based in the Boston area who has been tasked with building “the clinic of the future” didn’t surprise me at all. Our work with POUNDS TRANSFORMATION building SindyAR with the CYS mindfulness app seemed a sure fit to guide her towards - patients can stay connected to their doc 24/7 if they want to, as it makes thoughtfulness fun. And the huge hosipital could go global because our mobile app quantifies patient’s emotional joy/pain in a score between -40 & +60 that the caregiver can see in real time. They can even triangulate the SindySCORE with more tangible data like the BPM or glucose level as the exact moment the patient plays the game if they want to with any RPM client.

(Unfortunately tho Seth would dig it, he is too young to be a Sindy Subscriber because the blend of Fhysical Reality (FR) and Virtual Reality (VR) by optimizing Augmented Reality (AR) has to be so gently guided and more on that from many studies you can find out there from medical professionals)

But no, it was SindyVR that she finds critical to the heart health of the patients of the future. She impressed upon me that Mobile apps were very 2015, as if we all know that it’s impossible to even pull out your phone when you are having a heart attack and the buttons are too little anyway so then I began thinking that the hospital of the future should will want to add those MediAlerts hanging around our necks into the definition of XR and then I was kinda thinking it was more AR and that really all of these devices are obviously “a”ugmenting our lives so why do we need an acronym…….well, obviously, I have fallen and I can’t get up (from all these visions dancing thru my head this Labor Day Weekend)………but it all feels so right on! Right for GenZ in the future but also right now! Those of us looking at the Peloton bike in our bedroom, the watch on our wrist and the smart water bottle on our desk and thinking, what does all this technology have to do with my people/my life/my work? Real Reality and Intelligent Intelligence.

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The answer is Seth’s estranged Uncle, Faith’s Seussical cast mate or Jimmy’s nutritionist who are all on the Team but 100% digitally represented. Over 15 years ago Facebook made me feel closer than emails and texting made connecting more efficient than a phone call. This year Zoom made a MeetUp of family or colleagues feel more protected from the virus and steps towards carbon neutral with our commute time. Whatever SindyXR comes out with next month will hopefully better combine, exceed for Seth, Faith and Jimmy with their Team to solve this deep loss of engagement in a unique way by injecting biorhythms into augmented reality tools or this is not the greatest job I have ever had.

Noooooo I’m joking, what we are building is way better than that. Maybe I could get you all to meet with me for a healthy dinner after work sometime next week and introduce you to each other in my SindyXR CUBE?

Sincerely,

Sindy.

PS A little business:

As you may have seen at the top, we need to ask you all to help keep the business afloat so the Sindy mobile apps will now be $3/month instead of free as of September 8, 2021 so download them today. Sign up now with iPhone or here for Androids before the app goes to a subscription model.

Facilitator Privileges are still only $25/month which you can try for 30 days free if you sign up here and thank you deeply to those of you who have supported me and used Sindy to track yourself for Good! and be better together. Wherever.

I think we are on the right track, don’t you? Let me know by signing up, telling a friend, posting on our socials and cannot wait to collab with you.

If you would like to hear more about the enterprise platform for health care please download our WHITE PAPER and then if you want more please pick a time to ENGAGE with one of us soon as you are ready. It is not boring.

Three XR Tales

Faith

“Sindy’s weird but it’s better than eating alone cuz when I’m alone I freak eat.”

Jimmy

Seth

better together. wherever.