New Delhi: PV Sindhu appeared at this year’s World Badminton Championship with a wearable apparatus stuck to her side of her forhead or temple. It was an early glimpse that we would get of a wearable toy that would change the way we monitor our health.
In this case getting to track the blood flow to the brain and any possible damages it might cause. The Temple, as the nut shaped metallic thing stuck to the forehead is called, was the invention of Deepinder Goyal, the owner and founder of quick commerce giant Zomato. This Temple is where science would pray.
But suddenly soon as the pre-orders for this product started at Rs 85,000 all hell broke loose around the Temple. Many doctors felt that it was a scam and such a digital toy would be of no use, let alone tell us what is happening in the brain.
Leading the attack on Temple is @theliverdoc, the Kochi-based DR Cyriac Philip, who over the last few years has tweeted relentlessly to prove ayurveda and hoemopathy as a fraud medical practices and called out various online influencers who pretended to be experts on the heart, lung and veins. What made Dr Philip a credible scientist is that he attached research papers to prove every point of his.
Temple, he said, is nothing but a scam since the wearable measures the blood flow in just one artery which feeds the face with blood. Nothing inside the brain can be gauged by this instrument and the wearable will serve no purpose. It was a nobrainer!
Goyal, who blocked the Liver Doc, posted against doctors in general who did not believe in his Temple and countered it by saying that he had put $20 million of his own money and he did not need to do any scam. The entire IIT, IIM and US-returned crowd lined up in support of Goyal but the science part remained unanswered.
There was no science that Goyal and his supporter or his science team could put out to counter the theory that it served no purpose. (attach @liverdoc tweets here)
Dr Cyriac also assessed the papers written but not peerreviewed as all scientific inventions should be. Pasting crucial parts of these papers he said there was no proof that Temple works and pointed out that all positive papers were written by people who were part of Goyal’s science team.
Among the doctors who tweeted that the Temple is a con job, another expert on the subject, Dr Jason Philip said that the “Temple’s core pitch collapses under basic medical scrutiny. It is sold as an adhesive optical sensor place over the temple that measures blood flow. And a laughable gravity ageing hypothesis. Blood flow to the brain is by Internal Carotid artery and Vertibral systems. To assess them you need transcranial Dopples Ultra Sound measuring Middle Cerebral Artery or phase contrast MRI. This device can possibly measure extra cranial flow changes but not not reliably, blood flow to the brain." This was the general tone of all doctors who thought the Temple adhesive device was a con job.
The pre-orders of the device at Rs 85,000 are still on, but scientific scrutiny seems to have scuttled what Zomato’s Goyal thought would be a world conquering wearable. In the absence of any counter scientific argument from Goyal’s team so far, it can be assumed that Temple fails in crucial scientific evidence.
Also while Gen Z and the health freak crowd would like to measure heart rate and blood pressure and distance they have run or walked by using the well know wearable on their wrist or arms, it is a bit difficult to assume that the same crowd would also want to measure blood flow to the brain and stick a metallic nut on the Temple. But by trying to innovate something that would have global possibilities Goyal really seems to have put in his money into the wrong Temple.
