In an exclusive piece for MediaBrief’s HealthBrief, Gaurav Gupta, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of health and wellness platform Gabit, writes about the growing importance of preventive healthcare, the role of technology in driving healthier everyday habits, and why marketers must focus on behaviour change rather than fear-based messaging. Read on.
Somewhere right now, someone is wearing their exhaustion like a medal. Four hours of sleep, always switched on, “I’ll rest when the quarter closes.” We all know the type; many of us have been the type. And often the story ends the same way — an ordinary morning, a tightness in the chest, a scramble to the hospital, a family that spends whatever it takes. The scare passes. What lingers is the quieter realisation that comes after: for years, the body had been filing reports that nobody was reading. The sleep that kept getting skipped, the stress that never switched off, the fitness that slipped without anyone noticing. The emergency was never the beginning of the story. It was the end of one that had been writing itself, silently, for a very long time.
That, in one story, is the opportunity in preventive health — and the reason it so often gets overlooked.
The reason is deeply human. When prevention works, nothing dramatic happens. There is no recovery to celebrate, no before-and-after, only a slightly better version of an unremarkable day. The rewards are real but invisible in the moment or even in the short term, and the mind reliably prefers what it can feel now.
For decades we have treated health as something to address once it breaks: out-of-pocket spending still accounted for 43.4% of total health expenditure in 2022-23 (National Health Accounts) — a measure of how much of our attention, and our money, arrives only at the point of crisis.
Yet the story doesn’t end there. Non-communicable diseases — heart disease, diabetes, respiratory illness — account for roughly 66% of deaths in India (WHO), and a significant share of them are shaped by everyday behaviour: how we sleep, move, and handle stress. That is a sobering figure, but it is also an empowering one. It means the same daily choices that create risk can also reduce it. Prevention is not fate. It is a set of habits — and habits are precisely what good marketing knows how to build.
The conventional instinct is to try to build them through fear: the alarming statistic, the ticking clock. It seldom works. Fear produces a spike of anxiety, after which the mind defends itself and looks away. You can prompt someone into a single test; you cannot frighten anyone into a decade of better sleep. People don’t build lasting habits because they’re scared. People are far more likely to adopt behaviours they admire than warnings they fear.
But influence can only open the door. Long-term behaviour change depends on building products people genuinely love—because satisfied users become the most credible advocates, turning personal progress into conversations that inspire others to start.
The opportunity, then, is to make prevention relatable and achievable — to show people that it is made of specific things they can actually influence.
Consider sleep, the habit we surrender first and understand the least. Every night the body repairs itself — regulating hormones and resetting the systems that govern blood sugar and blood pressure. The difficulty was always that the quality of one’s sleep could not be felt or understood. Now it can be seen: light, deep and REM stages estimated. The moment rest becomes a number one can watch improve, it stops being an afterthought and becomes a goal.
Another powerful metric, VO₂ Max — the volume of oxygen the body can use at full exertion, widely regarded as a gold-standard marker of cardiorespiratory fitness and one of the stronger predictors of longevity. Once confined to specialised laboratories, it can now be measured on demand through devices as compact as a smart ring, turning fitness from a matter of appearance into a metric of longevity.
And perhaps the most overlooked signal – stress, which accumulates gently rather than loudly. Heart Rate Variability offers a readable sense of how the nervous system is coping from day to day, and even modest movement can help lower cortisol. Seen this way, prevention is not a distant idea. It is a series of small, informed adjustments to a body one can finally read.
That is the thinking behind a device like Gabit: a single ring, light enough to forget, that draws these threads into one place—tracking sleep stages, fitness and on-demand VO₂ Max, reading stress through HRV, connecting activity to recovery and nutrition, and supporting women’s health. Signals that were once invisible, available only in a clinic and often noticed only after something had already gone wrong can now be understood every day.
At the centre of it is PEP Talk, Gabit’s AI health coach, which interprets those signals, identifies meaningful changes over time and recommends actionable steps. Features such as AI voice-based food logging let users simply speak what they’ve eaten, turning meals into nutritional insights in seconds. Less a gadget to be managed than a discreet health companion that helps healthy choices become repeatable habits.
And the audience is already here. Consumers are increasingly investing in fitness, nutrition, diagnostics and health-tracking technologies, reflecting a broader shift from reactive healthcare to preventive health. A younger, more digital and more health-conscious generation is reshaping its approach to health in real time.
The next evolution is not collecting more health data but connecting it. Sleep, nutrition, recovery, blood markers and activity rarely exist in isolation, yet they are often scattered across different apps and reports. That shift, from disconnected metrics to connected insight, is what makes prevention actionable rather than aspirational.
The task for marketers is not to alarm people about a distant illness. It is to convert attention into action, and action into routine — to make the considered choice the natural one. In a country learning to read its own signals before they become emergencies, helping prevention become a habit may be among the most valuable things our work can do.
Gaurav Gupta is the Founder & CEO of Gabit, an integrated longevity platform aimed at enabling everyone to live healthier and longer. Before building Gabit, he was one of the founders and COO at Zomato, and was at the forefront of turning it into the largest food delivery and restaurant discovery platform in India. Gaurav led the IPO roadshow for Zomato in 2021 when it was listed for ~USD 12 Bn. Prior to Zomato, Gaurav was a Senior Principal with Kearney in the consumer industries and retail space. Gaurav holds an engineering degree from IIT Delhi and an MBA from IIM Calcutta.
