The Health Metric Nobody Tracks

Open your phone. Count the health apps. You probably track sleep, steps, heart rate, maybe calories or HRV. You might wear an Oura ring, an Apple Watch, a Whoop strap. You know your resting heart rate to the decimal.

Now ask yourself: do you know how your body actually moves?

The Biggest Health Problem You've Never Heard Of

Musculoskeletal conditions: back pain, joint problems, restricted mobility. Together they are the #1 cause of disability worldwide. Not heart disease. Not diabetes. Not mental health. MSK.

The numbers are staggering:

1.7 billion people globally. It is the leading cause of years lived with disability, ahead of every other condition group. And unlike heart disease or cancer, which get billions in research funding and public awareness campaigns, musculoskeletal health is barely a conversation.

We Track Everything Except This

The health tracking industry is worth tens of billions of dollars. We've built sensors for almost every biomarker imaginable. But look at what we actually track versus what actually causes disability:

Steps count how much you move. They say nothing about how you move. You can walk 10,000 steps a day and still have your hips compensating, your knees collapsing inward, and your spine doing the work your core should be doing.

Why This Matters More Than You Think

Peter Attia calls it "the Centenarian Decathlon": the idea that longevity isn't just about not dying, it's about being able to move, lift, bend, and balance in your 80s and 90s. The research backs him up: grip strength, balance, and functional movement are among the strongest predictors of all-cause mortality in older adults.

But here's the thing: by the time you notice a problem, you've been compensating for years. Back pain doesn't start the day it hurts. It starts years earlier, when your body quietly shifts load from one structure to another. By the time you feel it, the pattern is deeply ingrained.

Nobody wakes up with bad mobility. It degrades one sitting hour at a time, over years, without you noticing.

Most of It Is Preventable

That's the part that should change how we think about this. The majority of musculoskeletal issues, the back pain, the stiff shoulders, the knee problems, are not sudden injuries. They're patterns. Accumulated over months and years of repetitive movement (or lack of it). Occupational health bodies treat musculoskeletal disorders as largely preventable when they're addressed early.

Prevention means catching the pattern before it becomes pain. That requires measurement. You can't fix what you don't see.

We have an entire industry built around heart health: smartwatches that detect AFib, apps that log blood pressure, CGMs that track glucose spikes in real time. Meanwhile, the condition that actually disables the most people has almost no consumer-facing measurement tools.

What Would Change If We Tracked Movement Like Sleep

Oura didn't invent sleep. It made sleep visible. Before sleep tracking, people "felt tired." After, they knew why: fragmented REM, elevated resting heart rate, not enough deep sleep. That visibility changed behavior.

Movement quality needs the same shift. Right now, people "feel stiff" or "have a bad back." They don't know that their left hip compensates 15 degrees more than their right, or that their torso tips forward every time they squat, or that their neck does the work their shoulders should be doing.

Make the invisible visible, and people change. Not because you told them to, but because they can finally see what's happening.

What We're Working On

We're building the movement equivalent of a sleep score. A phone, a camera, a few minutes, and you know how your body actually moves. Not steps. Not calories. Movement quality: where you compensate, where you're restricted, where your body is moving older than you are.

Across more than 250 assessments with earlier versions of the product, one thing was clear: nobody moves as well as they think they do. In our early internal evaluation, 7 in 10 people moved older than their actual age, by 7 years on average. And the patterns are fixable if you catch them early.