Why Cipher Skin Exists

Once upon a time in a land really far away, but like not that far away if you take a couple of flights and a bus and don’t mind being hot and sandy all the time and living in a tiny trailer house…

After a career in special operations, Phillip had sustained everything from blast injuries to a broken pelvis and femur. He woke up each day in pain, and couldn’t train consistently without being set back by an injury. By the time he met me in Baghdad, he had lost much of his strength and endurance.

I started training Phillip in the gym, and within six months he was back to running sub 5-minute miles and deadlifting triple his own bodyweight without pain.

This kind of transformation is extremely rare for people who don’t have professional one-on-one coaching. Phillip and I started talking about how this process could be scaled to allow thousands of people to experience the equivalent of an experienced coach watching them and providing feedback in real-time.

Current technology can’t solve this problem. Wrist-top devices and heart rate straps can capture isolated quantitative data, but they can’t come close to seeing the entire body as a system at once. They needed something that could track the body’s position and movement as well as critical vital signs such as respiration and heart rate, and they needed to see that data at the exact same time.

Seeing everything simultaneously is a critical piece of the puzzle because it allows the user to see the interactions between components, rather than just the parts in isolation. This allows the type of data analysis that leads to the prediction of future events, rather than just the measurement of current ones.

Our company’s mission is to put a team of experts into everyone’s pocket. We get there by turning the physical world into data, organizing, and understanding interactions, which creates a true reflection of our reality that we call the Digital Mirror™.