How We Know
From Heart Rate to Microbiome
We believe your heart rate is more than a pulse; it is a real-time biosensor. Our research has implications for the relationship between physiological responses and the hidden world of the microbiome.
While a specific food might make your heart rate spike today, that data may actually be a signal of the deeper interplay between your nutrition and your gut health. Inlet Health endeavours to contribute to the understanding of how your internal ecosystem dictates your mood, energy, and long-term vitality.
The New Era of Knowing
We are moving beyond the era of the wearable and into the era of the Knowable. At Inlet Health, we don't just collect data; we decode the invisible dialogue between your lifestyle and your biology.
By treating the human body as a complex data system, we’ve transformed 15 years of observations into a platform that identifies the physiological "echoes" of everything you consume. We turn the hardware on your wrist into a window into your unique internal state.
NIK
Our First Frontier
Our flagship product, NIK (Now I Know), is the first step in this journey. By syncing with your Apple Watch, NIK provides an immediate feedback loop, identifying which foods trigger larger physiological responses. But NIK is just the beginning. As a platform company, Inlet-Health is leveraging these insights to build a future where data-driven nutrition is the standard for preventive care.
preventive care
Our Story
Inlet Health was founded by Joyce Waterhouse PhD, following more than a decade of systematic research into heart rate responses to food — work that began in 2008, years before consumer wearables made such monitoring widely accessible. When the Apple Watch brought continuous heart rate monitoring to the wrist, it opened the door to capturing these responses at scale, and the NIK app was born.
NIK allows users to track and analyze heart rate changes in relation to individual foods and meals, and add notes and journal to build a richer, more complete picture of how diet affects them. Inlet Health is working with researchers at Oxford University as part of its broader mission to advance the science of personalized nutrition.
Our Vision
Our vision is to advance the understanding of how individual foods drive real-time personal responses, including the heart rate patterns around mealtimes that wearable technology can reveal creating a genuine opportunity to explore these responses in ways previously unavailable.
We believe these patterns are not endpoints in themselves, but windows into deeper personal processes — including the individualized relationship between diet and overall
well-being.
Our longer-term vision is to contribute a behavioral and physiological data layer that complements existing microbiome research, helping people better understand the connection between what they eat, how they feel, and the daily habits that support their long-term well-being.
Technology
Our NIK platform is built on proprietary algorithms developed to detect and analyze pulse signals captured through Apple Watch — translating raw heart rate data into meaningful, individualized nutritional insights. In collaboration with our technology partner, who developed the NIK platform, we are advancing a novel, proprietary ML-based approach to extract heart rate signals directly from smartphone hardware alone, without any wearable device.
We believe this method, which has shown early promise, will reach high accuracy over the coming months — a development that would fundamentally expand both the scalability and accessibility of personalized wellness insights.