By David Shaywitz
An initiative exploring how health tech can build capability and agency,
so people can stay well and live more fully.
KindWellHealth explores how health tech can build capability and agency, so people can stay well and live more fully.
The work is animated by research linking agency and health, and by evidence that agency is strengthened by building usable competences people can carry across situations.
Competences means reusable skills and routines -- practical ways of following through -- that people can deliberately carry across situations.
A challenging run can become more than exercise: with the right framing, it becomes evidence that you can persist when it’s uncomfortable. That competence can show up later -- in work, in relationships, in how you care for yourself. And it runs the other way, too: with a little guidance, skills you build outside athletics -- curiosity, consistency, showing up -- can make it easier to start (or restart) movement and fitness.
KindWellHealth is based on the idea that health emerges from the interplay of three foundational elements:
Physiology: grounding health in biology, using the best available science on sleep, movement, metabolism, and biomarkers without hype or false precision.
Agency: capability and conviction: the sense that you can still shape your future, strengthened by a pattern of acting on that belief.
Connection: relationships, communities, and purpose that make life meaningful and make healthy choices sustainable.
This working project brings together ideas, research, and essays on how physiology, agency, and connection can support durable health for real people living in a highly contingent world.
I approach this work as a physician-scientist and longtime health-innovation executive, focused on how teams can translate these ideas into tools and experiences that help people build capability and agency.
KindWellHealth seeks to:
Clarify and refine an integrated vision of health that unites physiology, agency, and connection.
Translate that vision into practical, repeatable ways to build capability and agency in ourselves and others.
Explore how health systems, workplaces, and digital platforms can be designed to support these foundations.