Inside clinic which uses HD cameras, radar and lasers during controversial high-tech MOTs
A new high-tech screening clinic co-founded by the boss of Spotify hopes to revolutionise healthcare by picking up signs of disease long before there are any symptoms.
Neko Health uses high resolution cameras, lasers and radar to capture millions of data points around the body, checking for problems that could become serious and even life-threatening in future.
It’s the latest in a wave of companies offering controversial high-tech MOTs. Some doctors warn they may increase health inequities and add to NHS workload by referring people with potentially insignificant findings.
Daniel Ek – the chief executive of the music streaming service – and his partner Hjalmar Nilsonne want to engage with the debate.
In one of the clinic’s softly-lit scanning rooms, Hjalmar tells me that healthcare has traditionally been about treating symptoms – “reactive”, as he calls it.
Co-founder Hjalmar Nilsonne says people need to be given long-term health not medicine
“We have to find a way to become more proactive, more preventative, to help people stay healthy longer,” he says.
“Instead of giving them medicine, give them long-term health.”
Neko Health’s first clinic outside its hometown of Stockholm, Sweden, is a world away from the busy London shopping street that it lies beneath.
A total of nine cameras take more than 2,000 images of your skin
It looks like something straight out of sci-fi.
In the centre of the room is a booth not unlike the teleporters in Star Trek.
Step inside and nine cameras – HD, 3D and thermal – take more than 2,000 images to build a high-resolution map of every mole, freckle and blemish on your skin.
If you return for annual checks it allows the clinic to track changes in size, pigmentation and other warning signs of skin cancer.
Next to the booth there’s more tech that could easily have been wielded by Star Trek’s Dr McCoy on his starship crewmates.
Lasers are able to spot early signs of cardiovascular disease
To spot early signs of cardiovascular disease lasers analyse the stiffness of arterial walls, shimmering patterns of green light check blood circulation and blood pressure cuffs take simultaneous readings on all four limbs.
There’s a blood sample taken too to measure cholesterol, blood glucose, biomarkers of inflammation and lots more.
In less than an hour millions of data points are collected and analysed, with a doctor explaining the findings.
For the record I, like 79% of those scanned in the Stockholm clinic’s first year, got a clean bill of health.
But 14% of the clients in Sweden needed medical treatment for something picked up in the health check. And 1% had potentially life-saving care for serious problems they were previously unaware of.
In less than an hour millions of data points are collected and analysed
More than three-quarters of customers have booked again for a year’s time. Most, it seems, consider the checks worth the £300 cost.
It’s a growing market.
You can pay several thousands to companies offering whole-body MRI scans to see what’s going on below the skin.
Kim Kardashian gave a celebrity buzz to a company called Prenuvo by referring to its scanner as a “life-saving machine” in an Instagram post.
The shift towards disease prevention has big champions.
Professor Sir John Bell, now of the Ellison Institute of Technology in Oxford, was instrumental in creating the UK Biobank, Genomics England, and more recently the Our Future Health study – all initiatives to dive deep into patient data to spot signs of disease.
Professor Sir John Bell says preventative health checks will be the norm in the next 10 years
He says preventative health checks will be the norm in the next 10 years.
Not the rudimentary lifestyle questionnaires the NHS offers to mid-life patients now. There’ll be far more tech – and AI – running the rule over our inner health.
But it’s a mindshift for the NHS.
“People don’t want to talk to you about cardiac problems until you have chest pain, and then they’re quite keen to talk to you,” Professor Bell says.
“But the trouble is, they picked it up too late because for the last 35 or 40 years it’s been accumulating in your cardiac vessels. You’ve been asymptomatic, so nobody’s done anything about it.
“Understanding which diseases you have and capturing them fast at their earliest stage will mean you have a much longer, healthy life expectancy.”
But other doctors are more cautious.
Dr Saira Ghafur, a respiratory physician at Imperial College London, is concerned that the people who are most likely to have underlying health problems are the least likely to be able to afford private check-ups. It could make existing health inequalities even worse, she fears.
Dr Saira Ghafur fears health MOTs could worsen inequalities
There’s also the risk private health checks will add to NHS waiting lists, Dr Ghafur tells me. They’ll pick up lots of issues that need NHS follow-up but ultimately turn out to be nothing to worry about.
And then there’s the lack of evidence that the issues picked up actually matter.
“We have to make sure that we’re doing prevention right,” she says. “For that, we need a very strong evidence base.
“But we are going to have to wait many years to be able to show that doing this screening, collecting these data points, has actually resulted in better (health) outcomes.”
That hasn’t deterred people from signing up to Neko Health. Its Stockholm clinic has a waiting list of 20,000 and it expects strong demand for checks at its London branch.
Hjalmar Nilsonne comes from a family of doctors and says he understands the concerns of an overworked medical profession.
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The company does follow-up checks itself to be sure the problems picked up on scan are significant before telling people to seek NHS treatment.
He wants the health service to see preventative health checks as a help, not a hindrance.
“70% of the healthcare costs in society come from chronic disease,” he says. “Most chronic disease can be prevented or greatly delayed if you find it early enough.
“So we’re really focused on finding the early signs that things are going in the wrong direction and helping you find the ways to counteract that and avoid it in the first place.”
Labour MP Tulip Siddiq has been sentenced to two years in jail for corruption in Bangladesh.
Ms Siddiq was accused of using her influence over her aunt, the country’s former prime minister, to illegally secure plots of land for family members in the diplomatic zone of the capital Dhaka.
She was being tried in absentia.
Her aunt, Sheikh Hasina, was ousted last year and has since been sentenced to death, although she fled to India before she could be arrested.
Ms Siddiq, her niece, has described herself as “collateral damage” in the new Bangladesh government’s campaign against Ms Hasina, and previously said the trial was based on “fabricated accusations and driven by a clear political vendetta”.
In response to the sentence on Monday, Ms Siddiq said the “whole process has been flawed and farcical from the beginning to the end”.
“The outcome of this kangaroo court is as predictable as it is unjustified,” she added. “I hope this so-called ‘verdict’ will be treated with the contempt it deserves.
“My focus has always been my constituents in Hampstead and Highgate, and I refuse to be distracted by the dirty politics of Bangladesh.”
The MP previously said the trial was ‘driven by a clear political vendetta’. File pic: Reuters
The Labour MP resigned her ministerial post earlier this year after she was accused of illegally receiving a plot of land from her aunt.
An investigation by Sir Keir Starmer’s ethics adviser, Sir Laurie Magnus, did not find “evidence of improprieties”.
However, he said it was “regrettable” that Ms Siddiq had not been more alert to the “potential reputational risks” of the ties to her aunt.
The UK does not have an extradition treaty in place with Bangladesh.
Former prime minister: Investigation ‘corrupt’
Awami League, a banned political party in Bangladesh, led by Ms Hasina, said that the verdicts were “entirely predictable… just as other recent ACC (Anti-Corruption Commission) cases have been,” and accused the commission of being led by “desperate, unelected men”.
Ms Hasina then added in a statement through the party: “No country is free from corruption. But corruption needs to be investigated in a way that is not itself corrupt.
“The ACC has failed that test today. It is controlled by an unelected government run by the Awami League’s political opponents.
“It has exclusively targeted members of the Awami League, or those seen to be sympathetic to our party, and done nothing to prosecute or even investigate the cronyism that has escalated in Bangladesh since Dr Mohammad Yunus and his so-called interim government took power.”
The former prime minister was handed a combined 21-year prison sentence in other corruption cases last week.
Siddiq was accused of obtaining plots of land from Sheikh Hasina, former prime minister and her aunt. File pic: AP
‘Profound concerns’ raised by British lawyers
Last week, a group of prominent British lawyers and former cabinet ministers wrote an open letter raising “profound concerns” over Ms Siddiq’s trial in Bangladesh.
Barrister Cherie Blair, who is married to ex-prime minister Tony Blair, Sir Robert Buckland, who served as justice secretary, and Dominic Grieve, an ex-attorney general, wrote that the criminal proceedings against Ms Siddiq were “artificial and a contrived and unfair way of pursuing a prosecution”.
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The lawyers wrote that Ms Siddiq did not have a “proper opportunity of defending herself”.
“She is being tried in her absence without justification and… the proceedings fall far short of standards of fairness recognised internationally,” they said.
The letter was also signed by high-profile lawyers Philippe Sands and Geoffrey Robertson.
They called for the Bangladeshi authorities to put all the allegations to Ms Siddiq’s lawyers “so that she has a fair opportunity to address them”.
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The family of a father-of-four who died on holiday in Benidorm say new evidence has further convinced them that foul play was involved in his death.
Nathan Osman, 30, from Pontypridd in South Wales, was on a long weekend break with friends in Benidorm in September 2024.
Less than 24 hours after he arrived, his body was found by an off-duty police officer at the bottom of a remote 650ft (200m) cliff on the outskirts of the resort.
He died from head and abdominal injuries after falling from height, a post-mortem found.
Local police said it was “a tragic accident” that occurred after Nathan left his friends in Benidorm to walk back to his hotel room alone.
But his family believe the investigation into his death has not been adequate, and that the local authorities have never considered the possibility of a homicide.
Nathan Osman. Pic: Family photo
Their suspicions of foul play were first provoked by the fact that the remote location where Nathan was found was in the opposite direction to the hotel, and some distance away on foot.
They began doing their own investigating, building a timeline of events drawn from sources including CCTV, witness statements and Nathan’s bank records, which they say showed attempts were made to use his bank cards the day after he died.
After presenting their findings to Spanish prosecutors as evidence that others may have been involved, the case was reopened earlier this year.
Now, the family have told Sarah-Jane Mee on The UK Tonight that new phone data they have uncovered suggests he couldn’t have reached the spot he was found on foot.
Nathan’s brother Lee, mother Elizabeth and father Jonathan speak to Sarah-Jane Mee
After getting the phone back a couple of months ago, they say they tracked Nathan’s last movements through a health app.
“There’s a breakdown inside the app of every 10 minutes – the distance, pace, measurement of pace… every detail you can think of,” Nathan’s brother, Lee Evans, tells Mee.
“His pace wasn’t consistent with a fast walk or even a sprint.”
He said it was a faster journey, despite being uphill for 40 minutes, which has convinced the family that he was in a vehicle.
Pic: Family handout
The family also went to visit the area where Nathan was found.
“We were a bit upset, but we were very pleased we went up there”, his mother, Elizabeth, says. “We could see… there’s no way he would have looked at that area and thought, ‘I’m going up here.’
“You can see straight off, there’s no clubs, there’s no hotels up there, there’s just the odd house dotted around. It was just out in the wild, there was nothing up there.”
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The family says the phone data has helped them determine that he died around half an hour after he was seen on CCTV walking towards his hotel in the early hours of the morning.
“It was really ridiculous to think that my son would’ve walked up there [the remote location where he died] at 4am in the pitch dark.”
After the family were interviewed by Mee in May, South Wales Police opened its own investigation into Nathan’s death.
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Nathan’s family speaking to Mee in May
Lee says the Welsh force has been “appalled” by the lack of evidence turned over from the local police’s investigation.
His and Nathan’s father, Jonathan, says: “No procedures were followed. Nothing was cordoned off, it wasn’t a crime scene. There’s loads of things that could’ve been taken. Tyre tracks, foot tracks, nothing. No DNA taken.”
Lee says: “All that we’ve done over the last year, this could’ve been squashed within the first week, two weeks [by local investigators].
“We’ve had to find out and keep delving into every possible outcome and overturn every stone possible. We started off with… a needle in a haystack, we had no direction or any support on which way to go.”
Nathan Osman. Pic: Family handout
What does Nathan’s family hope for now?
Nathan’s family say they have located 27 CCTV cameras which could have picked Nathan up in the area, after local investigators didn’t find any.
Elizabeth says that after alerting Spanish police to the locations, they were told that the CCTV “wouldn’t be working” or that footage would’ve already been erased.
“They just surmised everything,” she adds.
But the family, who found the last known CCTV footage of Nathan earlier this year, are convinced there is still hope.
Lee says: “There’s a number of CCTV footage in that area. We know there’s a way of finding a vehicle of some sort.”
But the family admit they may never find whoever could be responsible for Nathan’s death because so much time has been lost.
Elizabeth concludes: “Nathan walks with us every day. We all believe that,” adding that “all we want” is to find the ones responsible for his death and for him to “have the respect of a decent investigation”.
Sky News contacted Spanish police, which declined to comment, adding the case is under judicial review and it doesn’t want to hinder the course of the investigation.
South Wales Police told Sky News: “South Wales Police is carrying out enquiries on behalf of HM Coroner and a family liaison officer has been appointed to provide support.”
UK
UK weather: Danger to life warning for parts of UK as ‘month’s worth of rain’ to fall in 24 hours
There could be a “danger to life” from heavy rain and flooding across much of Wales until Tuesday, with up to a month’s worth falling within 24 hours, forecasters have warned.
An amber warning that “heavy rain is likely to bring some disruption and probable flooding”, issued by the Met Office, has been extended in most of South Wales until 11.59pm on Monday.
The warning states “fast flowing or deep floodwater is possible, which could cause a danger to life” in the majority of South Wales.
Pic: Met Office
Yellow rain warnings, meaning disruption is possible, have also been issued in parts of England and Wales from the early hours of Monday to 3am on Tuesday, and for most of Monday in southwest Scotland.
Check the latest weather forecast where you are
Forecasters predict 120mm (4.7in) of rain could fall in the highest ground of the area covered by the amber warning, while 20mm (0.8in) to 40mm (1.6in is expected widely and up to 80mm (3.1in) is likely in hilly parts.
The amount of rain projected to fall on Monday has caused landslides in Wales in the past, according to the British Geological Survey.
Monday could be “a significant event for many”, and its impact will likely be greater because the ground is already saturated, the Met Office said.
Around 240mm (9.4in) has already fallen in Wales this month, almost 100mm more than its November average of 162mm (6.4in), according to one of its meteorologists.
England and Wales together have had 143% of the normal rainfall, he added.
Senior operational Met Office meteorologist Marco Petagna said: “All areas have seen above normal rainfall, Scotland and Northern Ireland are less of an issue for tomorrow [Monday], away from southwest Scotland.”
He said parts of England and Wales “have seen already well-above normal rainfall and another several inches to come”.
Monday could be a “significant event for many” with flooding and landslides possible, he warned.
“Strong south to southwesterly winds will also accompany the heavy rain, with gales possible around coasts and over high ground.”
Homes and businesses could be flooded, and there may also be transport cancellations and power cuts.
Some communities could be cut off by flooded roads, officials said.
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Natural Resources Wales (NRW) has listed 34 alerts in southern parts of Wales, warning people to be prepared for possible flooding.
Richard Preece, NRW’s duty tactical manager, said: “With some rivers already swollen and the ground saturated, we expect to see a number of flood alerts and warnings issued.”
The Environment Agency has posted three alerts that say flooding is expected and 42 warning that it is possible.
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