Summary

As CTO and co-founder of SimondsHealth, Stephan built a cloud-native health-assessment platform that distilled lifestyle data and clinical blood work into a single metric — your MotivAGE — the biological age of your body versus your calendar age.

Situation

Chronic lifestyle diseases are the leading cause of preventable death, yet most people struggle to connect daily habits to long-term health outcomes. Academic research had established formulas to estimate biological age, but no consumer-friendly product existed to make that number actionable. Stephen Simonds, a General Practitioner and former colleague at UHG, had the clinical expertise and the vision; Stephan had the technology skills to bring it to life.

Tasks

• Design and build the entire technology platform from scratch.
• Develop personalised health-report generation covering lifestyle, mental health and the MotivAGE score.
• Manage freelance UX designers, front-end developers and offshore development resources.
• Ensure the platform was ready for B2B sales to employers, healthcare providers and gyms.

Actions

Stephan architected and hands-on developed a fully microservices-based platform on .NET, hosted on Azure with Azure SQL Server databases. Auth0 handled authentication, and VS Online (Azure DevOps) provided source control, build pipelines, automated deployments and progress tracking.

The consumer-facing web application — responsive across all major browsers — guided users through self-reporting questionnaires covering eating habits, physical activity, stress and sleep, plus an optional mental-health assessment. For the paid MotivAGE report, a practitioner conducted a clinical consult, took blood samples for cholesterol analysis, and recorded controlled physical activities such as sit-ups.

All assessment data fed into an academically grounded calculation engine that produced three tiers of personalised PDF reports (generated via Render.js):

• A free 12-page lifestyle report based on questionnaire responses.
• A paid 5-page mental-health report.
• A paid 8-page MotivAGE report combining lifestyle data with clinical blood work to produce the single MotivAGE score.

During analysis of real-world results, Stephan and Stephen discovered that the academic reference data — predominantly sourced from healthy 20-year-old university subjects — skewed calculations for older demographics. They applied minimal corrective adjustments to restore realistic outcomes for subjects in their 40s and 50s.

Results

• Delivered a complete cloud-native health-assessment platform from concept to production as a two-person core team.
• Built a scalable microservices architecture on Azure capable of serving B2B and B2C channels simultaneously.
• Automated personalised PDF report generation across three distinct report types.
• Identified and corrected age-bias flaws in established academic health-assessment models.

Reflection

The startup didn't get to sustainable revenu due to the lack of spare time next to dayjobs and family life.