We’re good at measuring harm after it has happened. We’re much less effective at understanding the everyday exposures that cause chronic disease over many years.
Eave is an occupational health technology company building an AI-enabled platform that combines wearable and environmental sensors to measure real-world exposure to noise, air pollution and vibration. They work with major UK construction, infrastructure and industrial organisations.
David Greenberg is Eave’s founder and CEO. His background is in neuroscience, and he founded the company in 2015 around the idea that connected technology could help intervene before exposure becomes disease. We spoke about making invisible health risks visible.
Can you introduce yourself and tell us about your role?
I’m David Greenberg, founder and CEO of Eave, an occupational health technology company I founded in 2015.
My background is in neuroscience, and over the past decade I’ve focused on how we can use connected devices, sensing and data to prevent chronic disease rather than waiting until people become ill.
At Eave, I lead the company’s strategy, product direction and commercial development. We’ve built an AI-enabled platform combining wearable and environmental sensors with cloud analytics to understand people’s real-world exposure to health risks such as noise, air pollution and vibration.
We’ve primarily deployed this technology in occupational health, working with major UK construction, infrastructure and industrial organisations. My focus through the OVHcloud Healthcare Accelerator is to explore how the same underlying technology can be translated into healthcare, particularly combining environmental and physiological data to support more predictive and preventative approaches to health.
How did your company come about and what was the motivation behind it?
Eave came out of my background in neuroscience and a frustration with how we approach occupational disease.
We are very good at measuring harm after it has happened, but much less effective at understanding the everyday exposures that cause chronic disease over many years. In workplaces, traditional monitoring is often periodic, someone visits a site, takes a measurement and produces a report, while the worker’s actual exposure is continuous and constantly changing.
I founded Eave in 2015 around the idea that connected technology could fundamentally change this. If we could continuously measure the environment around an individual, understand their personal exposure and intelligently analyse that data, we could intervene before exposure becomes disease.
We started with noise and hearing loss, developing connected hearing protection capable of measuring a worker’s actual exposure while they work. From there, the platform has expanded to monitor particulate matter and air quality, vibration and other environmental risks, bringing these data streams together within a single cloud platform.
That original motivation remains the same today: moving healthcare from episodic measurement and reactive treatment towards continuous monitoring, earlier intervention and ultimately prevention.
Can you describe your company’s mission and values?
Eave’s mission is to predict and prevent chronic disease by making invisible health risks visible.
Many of the factors that contribute to long-term disease, air pollution, noise and other environmental exposures, accumulate gradually and are difficult for individuals or organisations to understand in real time. Our goal is to use connected sensing, data and AI to continuously measure those risks, identify meaningful patterns and enable intervention before harm occurs. This builds directly on our existing platform, which combines wearable and environmental sensing with cloud analytics to identify emerging health risks and support earlier intervention.
Our core values are prevention, evidence and accessibility. We believe health technology should prevent disease rather than simply document it; decisions should be driven by objective, real-world data rather than assumptions; and sophisticated monitoring should be simple and scalable enough to reach the people who can benefit from it.
Ultimately, we want to help shift health from reactive treatment towards predictive, preventative care, giving individuals and healthcare professionals better information to act earlier and improve long-term outcomes.
What are some of the most pressing social issues that your company is working to address through its technology?
One of the most pressing issues we are addressing is the enormous burden of preventable chronic disease caused or exacerbated by the environments in which people live and work.
Exposure to air pollution, noise and other environmental hazards is often invisible and cumulative. People may be exposed for years before the consequences become clinically apparent. The problem is particularly acute in occupational settings, where chronic disease can develop over an entire career, but it also extends into homes and communities.
Eave is addressing this by making those exposures measurable at an individual level. Our connected wearable and environmental devices continuously capture factors including particulate matter, air quality, noise and vibration, with AI and cloud analytics identifying patterns and enabling earlier intervention.
A second issue is health inequality. People in more deprived or underserved communities can experience greater environmental and occupational health risks while having less access to continuous specialist monitoring. Our aim is to make sophisticated monitoring sufficiently low-cost, scalable and automated that it can move beyond hospitals and specialist assessments into workplaces, homes and communities. This was a key part of our healthcare proposition in the accelerator application.
We are trying to close the gap between exposure and intervention: identifying risk while there is still an opportunity to prevent disease, rather than discovering it years later when someone becomes a patient.
How does your company measure the impact of its work in creating positive change?
We measure impact by asking a simple question: has our technology changed what happens before harm occurs?
At the most immediate level, we measure exposure itself, how much noise, particulate matter, vibration or other environmental risk an individual experiences, when it occurs and how that changes over time. Our platform turns those continuous data streams into alerts, trends and actionable information rather than relying on occasional measurements or retrospective reporting.
We then look at whether that information changes behaviour and reduces risk: fewer or shorter harmful exposures, earlier interventions, better use of protective measures and evidence that organisations are addressing the underlying source of exposure.
As we move further into healthcare, we want to extend that framework to health outcomes: whether combining environmental and physiological data can identify deterioration earlier, reduce unnecessary appointments or admissions, and help clinicians understand the environmental factors influencing an individual’s condition. These are the outcomes we want to validate with healthcare partners such as Guy’s and St Thomas’.
Our measure of success isn’t how much data we collect. It’s whether that data leads to an intervention that reduces exposure, prevents disease or improves someone’s long-term health.
In your opinion, what impact will technology have in creating a better future?
I think technology’s greatest impact will come from helping us move from reacting to problems to predicting and preventing them.
Healthcare is a good example. Today, much of healthcare begins when someone develops symptoms, visits a clinician or is admitted to hospital. But connected devices, environmental sensors and AI increasingly allow us to understand what is happening to people continuously in the real world and identify changes long before a traditional snapshot might detect them.
That is the future we are working towards at Eave. We believe combining environmental data with wearable and physiological information can help reveal the relationship between the environments people experience and their long-term health, enabling earlier and more personalised intervention.
Technology can also democratise access to sophisticated monitoring. If devices become inexpensive, connected and increasingly automated, capabilities that once required specialist equipment and expertise can move into workplaces, communities and people’s homes. That creates an opportunity not only to improve healthcare, but to reduce health inequalities.
For me, the most exciting future isn’t one with more technology for its own sake. It’s one where technology gives people and professionals the information they need to make better decisions earlier, preventing problems that today we only know how to treat.
What advice do you have for other companies looking to use technology for good and create a positive impact in the world?
My advice would be to start with the problem, not the technology.
It is very easy to become excited about AI, wearables or the latest technology and then look for somewhere to apply it. The more difficult and valuable approach is to deeply understand a real problem and ask where technology can fundamentally change the outcome.
At Eave, we started with a simple problem: people are still developing preventable chronic diseases because harmful exposures are often invisible and we identify their consequences too late. The technology followed from that problem, connected sensors to make exposure visible, cloud infrastructure to bring the data together, and AI to turn that data into something people can act on.
I would also encourage companies to measure impact in terms of outcomes rather than activity. Collecting more data, deploying more devices or building a sophisticated AI model isn’t impact in itself. The important question is whether someone makes a better decision because of it.
Finally, build alongside the people who will actually use the technology. The best solutions tend to emerge when technologists, clinicians, researchers, industry and end users work together. If you can solve an important problem, demonstrate measurable real-world benefit and make the technology simple enough to scale, commercial success and positive social impact don’t have to be competing objectives.
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Eave is currently exploring how the same underlying technology can translate into healthcare settings, combining environmental and physiological data to support earlier intervention.
You can find out more at eave.io.
