With Owaves, Carmel Valley’s Royan Kamyar has created an app that helps people build healthier daily routines aligned with their natural body clocks.
The app’s physician-designed calendar incorporates a ’s personal circadian rhythm to plan out their days, such as finding the best bedtime for deep sleep, eating windows and the peak interval for getting in some movement.
The health-focused startup based at the Union Cowork space in Encinitas has become one of the top-rated health and fitness apps with over 1.2 million s worldwide.
While the Owave calendar looks bright and playful with emoji icons slotted throughout a sample day, a lot of thought and science went into the development of the app, with advice from the American College of Lifestyle Medicine, Scripps Research Institute, and UC San Diego’s Center for Circadian Biology and Center for Mindfulness.
Owaves received a National Institute of Health (NIH) grant for their collaboration on the Precision Medicine Initiative with Scripps Research Translational Institute, aiming “to understand how a person’s genetics, environment and lifestyle can help determine the best approach to prevent or treat disease.” Over the last five years on the grant, Kamyar said they earned $5 million and after cycling off the grant, they are now launching the app’s first set of subscriptions and coaching features aimed at helping people stay on track with sleep, focus and self-care.
“For the longest time I just kept my schedule in my head,” reads one positive Owaves review. “After using this app, I’ve gotten the skills to actually plan out bigger tasks and break them into smaller achievable ones. It really helps me realistically set goals for my days.”
In other reviews, people say the app has “fixed their body clock,” helping them to find balance and consistency, increase productivity, and structure their days in alignment with their wellness goals.
“Creating a successful business model in this space is not easy,” said Kamyar, a San Diego native now living in Carmel Valley. “Listening to people who are benefiting from the app is the fuel that gets us to the next milestone.”
A University of San Diego High School graduate, Kamyar went on to attend UC Berkeley and the Baylor College of Medicine. After doing his intern year in Manhattan, he returned to San Diego to earn his MBA at the UCSD Rady School of Management, focusing on entrepreneurship and health IT: “I always knew I wanted to come back home and start a company,” Kamyar said.
After graduating in 2010, he was the co-founder and chief medical officer at Sanitas, an outpatient management company, but he became increasingly more interested in prevention. He had found that the recommendations to live a long, healthy life for most people were always the same: exercise, eat right, get enough sleep, manage stress and maintain personal relationships.
With Owaves, they took the ingredients of lifestyle medicine to create software that people could take with them, a day planner that prioritized all those healthy activities.
“It was really grandma’s wisdom but no one was creating the right tools, let alone calendars,” Kamyar said.
The app incorporates the science of circadian rhythms, the body’s natural 24-hour clock. It’s basically a new way of keeping time, Kamyar said, something that previously only elite athletes and peak performers seemed to be taking advantage of.
The app helps people schedule activities by their unique circadian rhythms, based on the ’s individual chronotype. A ’s body clock is discovered and set through a five-question chronotype quiz. While traditionally chronotypes follow a bird theme (night owls have peak energy in the evenings while larks are most productive in the morning) Kamyar went with a nature theme—in Owaves, the definite morning chronotype is Morning Glory, moderate morning is a Sunflower, intermediate is Hibiscus, moderate evening is a Peace Lily, and Definite Evening is a Moonflower.
The interface is easy to use as s can drag and drop their activity tiles into their “O” — a colorful, visual day-planning ring where they can personalize the icons in the eight different categories, a physician-curated list of healthy lifestyle activities. Personal and work calendars can also be synced with the app.
Simplicity is the key but as Owaves kept getting requests to make custom categories, they added the paid features like oPlus for $6.99 a month ($49.99 a year) and oStar for $12.99 a month ($99.99 a year).
Kamyar said the app has gained the most traction among young adults, many of whom struggle with mental health issues like anxiety and ADHD. He sees the greatest need among college students, pointing to Jonathan Haidt’s best-selling book “The Anxious Generation” which addresses a growing mental health and attention crisis in American teenagers.
His two daughters are only two and four years old but Kamyar said he can already see signs that they are on “a conveyor belt toward inevitable destinations.” He believes his app is just one way to help break the cycle, to help people reclaim their time and reset their body clock.
“I think technology could and should improve our lives and guide us toward our health and fitness goals and not distract us,” said Kamyar. “We see this as an antidote to the attention crisis, to tune into the body’s clock to give us a com on how to navigate our lives.”
The app is free for iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch with a waiting list for Android. Learn more at owaves.com or in the Apple App Store and Google Play.
