Photos: Elchanan Kotler, Yehoshua Halevi

Before he had any vision of launching his high-tech startup, Moshe Lebowitz suffered from double vision.

Formerly the CEO of Oleh!, an e-mail marketing company, Lebowitz was just 30 years old in 2004 when a brain-tumor diagnosis took his personal and professional life in a radically unexpected direction.

The physical pressure from the tumor and the subsequent radiation, fatigue, and nausea introduced him to a new realm — life with chronic pain. When he emerged from that three-year-long battle, he resolved to use the experience to help others deal with both their physical and spiritual ailments. Lebowitz understands that when pain is persistent, it is nearly impossible to stay spiritually focused.

“The standard Western medical model takes a ‘find it and fix it’ approach,” Lebowitz says. “But it’s hard to get better if we use diagnoses to define ourselves. I had to learn that I was not my pain. Yes, I was a person in pain, but that did not define my essence.”

A Lubavitcher chassid, Lebowitz sought healing for his residual ailments over the next decade. He studied health, wellness, craniosacral therapy, and other modalities with the same passion he had invested in his previous high-tech ventures and study of chassidus.

The result is about nine months from the market, a patent-pending smart knee sleeve and companion “contemplation app,” codenamed Proud-1, a product that stands at the intersection of chassidus, high-tech, and the mindfulness movement. As the first garment to deliver microcurrent therapy, Lebowitz and his team at Healables, the company he founded, believe Proud-1 will both heal chronic pain and teach users to cope better.

“Pain is made up of two parts,” Lebowitz explains, “the physical sensation and the interpretation of the sensation. The interpretation can exacerbate the pain on the one hand or make it bearable on the other. Our startup takes the approach that Hashem guides every blade of grass and certainly every person, Jew and non-Jew alike. Our approach is to help people move from pain to purpose. Because of its integration of mind and body, our garment and mind-centering app is very much an outgrowth of chassidic thought. It’s Baal Shem Tov philosophy applied to the high-tech world.”

It Begins with a Spark

Proud-1, which looks like a sports compression knee sleeve, delivers minute doses of strategically placed electric current. The innovation, however, is not the treatment itself, but the method of delivering it.

During his journey to health, Lebowitz became familiar with the potential of electrotherapy to provide pain relief and speed up healing but he was dissatisfied with the way practitioners delivered the therapy. Typically, electrotherapy is administered via metal paddles, electrodes, or wet towels that carry electric current, with the aid of a sticky gel applied to the skin.

“It turns out that some people are allergic to the adhesives used and many find the goo unpleasant, myself among them,” he explains. “And on a logistical level, going to a clinic more than twice a week is a real challenge and the need to frequently replace the disposable electrodes is off-putting. And depending on where the pain is located, a person may not even be able to position the electrodes on his own. So we asked ourselves, what if we could bring the clinic to the patient and make it wearable? What if we could find a way to conduct electricity without the goo or wires?” (Excerpted from Mishpacha, Issue 718)