Halvard RamstadInteresting fact: Competed in an under-water robotics competition for ROVs in the USA.
TL;DR
Introducing our Bioinformatician turned Software Engineer, Aksel Lenes. Aksel studied robotics at NTNU in Norway, completed his masters degree in Bioinformatics, and worked as a Software Engineer at Norwegian unicorn company Oda.
What did you do before Livv?
I grew up in Svartskog, (”the black forest” in English) just outside of Oslo, Norway. I studied robotics at NTNU in Trondheim, Norway.
Early on I was interested in exploring the underwater world and after considering studying marine biology I ended up studying robotics and computer science. I worked in blue-eye robotics, developing ROVs to simplify underwater inspection.
Before Livv I worked as a Software Engineer for the Norwegian Unicorn Oda.
What are you currently working on at Livv and what tools do you work with?
I like to joke that I work from “Figma to Terraform”, where Figma is our design tool and Terraform is what we use to define our infrastructure in code.
Now I’m focusing on the AI processing pipeline, but also doing work in the doctor portal and native app.
One of the cool things about working at an early stage startup is the ability to own projects and follow them all the way from ideas, implementation to testing and iterating with customers.
Why do you believe in Livv Health and what is the problem we are solving?
I believe that health data ownership enables better health data literacy, which in turn leads to more agency and control over your health.
AI models are already getting very good at various benchmarks in medicine, and they are already very useful. I personally use Claude and ChatGPT to understand my own health documents.
I think these models will keep getting better and that the value people people get from them will continue to improve rapidly.
But to give good advice the model needs the context about your health and your history. I hope people can use Livv to build the rich context needed to get the best advice, both from normal physicians but also from LLMs. By building your own health context you’ll be able to get better advice from models, which I think will be invaluable for improving health literacy.
Any hobbies outside the office?
I love growing vegetables and flowers. And I’m a sucker for a good blog-post or substack article.
Other than that you can usually catch me cycling around the Oslo city centre.
If you could have dinner with any historical figure, who would it be and why?
The Economist Tyler Cowen, who’s still alive, but he’ll be historical one day! He makes my favorite podcast, I think he asks the best questions, and his enormous breadth of interest makes sure the podcast is never boring.
I really admire his curiosity to understand complex problems, and I would love to talk with him about his viewpoints on the world and understand how he thinks.
Lastly, what do you envision the healthcare system will look like in the future?
I like the term Peter Attia uses in his book outlive - distinguishing between medicine 2.0 which is all about treating disease, and reacting to diseases. I think we’ll move towards medicine 3.0 focusing on prevention and operating on a continuum of function instead of only acting on disease. I also think we’ll see amazing progress in biotech leading to us cracking many of the diseases that plague us now, over the next 10-30 years, and then medicine just needs to keep up!
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