Amazon named Maulik Majmudar, MD, its medical officer in August 2018 and he recently oversaw the team that developed Amazon Halo, the company's first wearables health tracker.
Dr. Majmudar was identified as the principle medical officer of Amazon Halo in the press release announcing the technology on Aug. 27.
"Despite the rise in digital health services and devices over the last decade, we have not seen a corresponding improvement in population health in the U.S. We are using Amazon's deep expertise in artificial intelligence and machine learning to offer customers a new way to discover, adopt, and maintain personalized wellness habits," said Dr. Majmudar in the company's press release. "Health is much more than just the number of steps you take in a day or how many hours you sleep. Amazon Halo combines the latest medical science, highly accurate data via the Halo Band sensors, and cutting-edge artificial intelligence to offer a more comprehensive approach to improving your health and wellness."
Here are five things to know about Dr. Majmudar:
1. He spent seven years at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston before joining Amazon, where he served as associate director of the Healthcare Transformation Lab. While at Mass General, he was part of the teams that developed several tech products and helped create the Ether Dome Challenge, which generated inventions including a text message-based notification for patient appointments.
2. Dr. Majmudar also received an education grant from the Aetna Foundation while at Mass General to launch a new fellowship in healthcare innovation and develop the next generation of clinician innovators.
3. This venture isn't his first foray into wearables. In 2012, Dr. Majmudar was a founding member of Quanttus, a medical wearables startup, and served as chief clinical officer until 2016. The company released an iPhone app to track blood pressure.
4. One interesting aspect of Amazon Halo is its use of machine learning to analyze energy and positivity in the user's tone to better understand how they sound to others and improve communication and relationships. In a blog post, Dr. Majmudar outlined why tone is important and shared how he is using the tone function: "I have been working from home with three kids under the age of 4, so I use Tone to gut check that I am not taking any stress out on my family or friends. I check my Tone results so that I can be more intentional about how I communicate in these strange times — and have noticed it takes a burden off my wife, as she doesn't have to be the one to tell me I am overly stressed."
5. Dr. Majmudar earned his medical degree at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago and completed his residency in internal medicine at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. He also underwent a cardiovascular medicine fellowship at Boston-based Brigham and Women's Hospital.