Peter Smittenaar


I am a consultant working to improve human wellbeing through technology and data. My time is spent working with companies and organisations in (digital) health, helping them improve their reach and impact by leveraging data and analytics. My clients include:

  • Hinge Health to establish how effective their digital health programs are for chronic knee and low back pain.
  • Surgo Foundation to apply market research methods to understand decision-making by mothers and health workers in India. I also assessed feasibility of machine learning solutions for streamlining data aggregation.
  • QuitGenius to provide expert advice so the first clinical trial of their quit smoking app is a scientific and business success.
  • Healum to advise what KPIs to focus on to build a strong health-economic case for their UK-based digital health service.

Prior to this I worked at Hinge Health as their principal data scientist and clinical researcher. I worked on the full breadth of commercial problem-solving including business intelligence, A/B testing, onboarding optimisation, data-driven user research, and modeling user engagement and ROI. I joined just after seed funding was secured, and I was there through Series A and most the way towards series B.

Before working on commercial projects I was the science lead in the Citizen Science team at Cancer Research UK. I received my PhD in neuroscience in 2015 (pdf) on the neuroscience of decision-making and reward learning, and was awarded a Sir Henry Wellcome fellowship to do 4 years of independent post-doctoral research which I ended up foregoing.

I am also one of the developers of The Great Brain Experiment (launched 2013), a smartphone game to collect psychological data.

I enjoy hearing from you if any of the above interests you, so do get in touch.