Panel on Biohacking Your Body
Veli-Jussi Jalkanen, Simon Wegerif & Jasmina Aganovic
Veli-Jussi Jalkanen (FIN)
Chair @ Salli Systems
Mr. Veli-Jussi Jalkanen is a health inventor, CAM and sitting health specialist. He has logically spread out sitting optimization to comprehend the whole physical working environment and started to think ergonomics as optimization of micro and macro circulation of the lymph and blood. Salli Concept includes awareness, furniture, their optimal use, sitting friendly clothing and body activity in numerous ways including PDNF, hormones and the electromagnetic body.
Jasmina Aganovic (USA)
President, Mother Dirt
Jasmina is a cosmetics and consumer goods entrepreneur who received her degree in chemical and biological engineering from MIT. Her unconventional path combined her technical background with roles at brands like LVMH, Fresh, NutraClick and Living Proof. She has extensive experience developing natural skincare products, brand-building, manufacturing partnerships, product launch strategy, digital advertising and direct sales.
Simon Wegerif (UK)
Biomedical Engineer, Inventor and Founder at HRV Fit (iThlete)
Simon Wegerif is a biomedical engineer and inventor who lives with his family in the New Forest in Hampshire, UK. His professional background is in signal processing, having been a pioneer of digital broadcasting at the BBC in London and Philips Electronics in the UK and Silicon Valley, where he managed a number of technology start up activities. Simon founded HRV Fit Ltd., the company behind leading heart rate variability smartphone app ithlete, in 2009 and has since been totally dedicated to the company. As the team has grown Simon has been able to focus his time of product development and programming. Recreationally, Simon has been a keen endurance athlete most of his adult life, firstly in rowing, then running, triathlon and nowadays a competitive cyclist.
This panel explores innovative approaches to biohacking the body. Jasmina Aganovic
We have been focused on fighting bacteria as a way to solve our problems, when in reality we need to restore balance as a means to solve our problems.
Summary
- Restoring ammonia-oxidizing bacteria to the skin rebalances the microbial ecosystem, helping to treat inflammatory disorders like acne and naturally reducing body odor by consuming sweat. - Conventional sitting restricts blood circulation and metabolism; using saddle chairs and integrating movement into the workspace improves spinal health, oxygenation, and brain function. - Heart rate variability (HRV) is a vital metric for measuring stress resilience, recovery from exercise, sleep quality, and mood, acting as an early warning system for illness and fatigue. - Advanced software and biofeedback techniques, such as controlled breathing, can create semi-permanent physiological changes to manage hypertension and improve overall neuroplasticity. - The medical field is shifting from a focus on sterilization to restoring biological balance, as diverse microbial environments are essential for a healthy and responsive immune system.
Article
Panel On Biohacking Your Body: The Radical Case For Working With Nature, Not Against It
At Biohacker Summit 2016 London, Three Speakers Argued That Better Health Might Begin With Bacteria, Breathing And The Way We Sit
In a culture addicted to quick fixes, the most striking idea to emerge from the **Panel on Biohacking Your Body** at **Biohacker Summit 2016 London** was also the simplest: the body already knows a great deal about how to heal, regulate and adapt, if only modern life would stop getting in its way.
On **Saturday, 21 May 2016**, in **London, United Kingdom**, three speakers approached that proposition from radically different angles. **Jasmina Aganovic**, president of Mother Dirt, made the case that modern hygiene had stripped the skin of beneficial bacteria essential to its balance. **Veli-Jussi Jalkanen**, chair of Salli Systems, argued that the seated world had become a slow violence against circulation, metabolism and pelvic health. **Simon Wegerif**, biomedical engineer and founder of HRV Fit, described heart rate variability as one of the clearest windows into stress, recovery and the body’s hidden thresholds.
Together, they sketched a vision of health that was less about domination than restoration. Less sterilise, suppress and medicate. More listen, measure and realign.
The Skin Was Never Meant To Be Sterile
Aganovic’s intervention was perhaps the most quietly revolutionary. Speaking from the frontier of skin microbiome science, she challenged the long-entrenched belief that cleanliness and health were synonymous with microbial absence.
Her focus was on **ammonia-oxidizing bacteria**, a once-common organism that had largely disappeared from modern human skin. Its absence, she suggested, left the skin’s ecosystem incomplete and unstable. In restoring that bacterial presence, the goal was not cosmetic novelty, but biological repair.
“We are learning that we can harness the microbial world in a way that allows us to ally with it to really improve our health,” Aganovic said during the panel.
That sentence carried the weight of a wider shift in medicine. For generations, bacteria had been cast chiefly as invaders to eliminate. Now, as microbiome research accelerated, a more complex picture was taking hold: many microbial species were not enemies but partners, and some were foundational. Aganovic described ammonia-oxidizing bacteria as a “keystone species”, capable of reshaping the wider skin environment. In studies, their return appeared not only to increase their own presence but to alter the surrounding ecosystem in meaningful ways.
That mattered for inflammatory conditions such as acne, for which her company’s clinical arm was pursuing FDA research. But it also mattered for something more mundane and more intimate: body odour. Sweat itself, Aganovic noted, does not smell. Odour arises from bacterial byproducts. Reintroducing the right bacteria could suppress odour-causing species and restore a more natural chemical balance.
The larger implication was profound. The future of skincare, and perhaps of medicine itself, might depend not on ever more aggressive eradication, but on learning how to rebuild a damaged ecology.
The Chair As A Public Health Crisis
If Aganovic challenged the modern bathroom cabinet, Jalkanen took aim at the office chair, the car seat and nearly every slouched posture of industrial society.
For 25 years, the Finnish health inventor had studied what sitting does to the body. His conclusion was unsparing: conventional seating, far from being a neutral feature of daily life, compromised circulation, reduced breathing depth, distorted spinal alignment and contributed to pain so common it had become culturally invisible.
“The whole world is slouching,” Jalkanen said, with the kind of bluntness that made the room shift uneasily in its seats.
His critique went beyond familiar warnings about back pain. Poor sitting, he argued, interfered with both **micro and macro circulation**, affecting tissues, muscles and even blood flow to the brain. The result was not merely discomfort but a quieter metabolic shutdown, one with consequences for cognition, energy and long-term disease risk.
He pointed to a simple but neglected signal: discomfort itself.
“We should be much more sensitive about the body and refuse to accept conditions where we are uncomfortable because that is the first sign of being in a bad way,” Jalkanen said.
It was a rebuke to a modern ethic that treats endurance of low-grade pain as maturity and adaptation as virtue. Jalkanen’s argument was the opposite. Numbness was not resilience. It was warning loss.
His preferred alternative was a system of **mobile saddle seating**, standing work and continuous micro-movement. The principle was not to replace one rigid posture with another, but to redesign the working environment so the body could keep moving. He advocated integrating exercises directly into the workday, brief muscular activations that could revive circulation and stave off fatigue.
“Introduce exercise tools to your working environment; you can challenge your muscles for a couple of minutes and get an anabolic refreshment that speeds up your day,” he said.
Even clothing, in his view, belonged in the ergonomics discussion. Trousers with poorly placed seams or constrictive design could create unhealthy pressure on the pelvis and impair circulation. Such details might sound eccentric until one accepts his broader premise: the body responds to everything.
Stress, Recovery And The Signal Hidden In The Heart
Where Aganovic dealt in microbes and Jalkanen in posture, Wegerif brought the conversation into the terrain of measurement. His subject, **heart rate variability**, or HRV, was not the number of times the heart beats each minute but the subtle variation in time between beats. Those fluctuations, he explained, offer a sensitive readout of the balance between stress and recovery in the nervous system.
“The more heart rate variability you have in the first place, the more stress you can tolerate before your body breaks down,” Wegerif said.
That made HRV more than a performance tool for athletes, though it had become influential in sport. It was also a broader index of resilience. High HRV was associated with recovery, adaptability and stronger parasympathetic activity, the branch of the nervous system linked to restoration. Low HRV, by contrast, could signal overload, illness, poor sleep or depressed mood.
Wegerif described how users had tracked links between HRV and exercise strain, sleep quality, sickness and even recovery from clinical depression. Sleep, in particular, emerged as a crucial frontier: a high HRV before bed predicted better restorative sleep. Mood, too, was not merely psychological weather but deeply physiological, entangled with the same brainstem mechanisms that shape HRV itself.
If that sounds abstract, its consequences were practical. The body often registered trouble before consciousness did. Changes in HRV could precede upper respiratory infections or reveal that an individual’s training, work or lifestyle load had exceeded what their system could absorb.
This was where Wegerif saw the future becoming especially powerful. By combining daily one-minute HRV readings with subjective reports and wearable data, machine learning could identify patterns invisible to the naked eye and alert users to hidden stressors before symptoms fully arrived.
He also pointed to biofeedback breathing as a serious therapeutic frontier, not wellness theatre but a non-pharmacological intervention with evidence behind it.
“Heart rate variability has the potential to help all of us improve the quality of our life and our health expectancy, and become a method to make us more pleasant human beings,” Wegerif said.
In a healthcare economy dominated by drugs, that claim sounded almost subversive. Yet his point was not anti-medicine. It was that physiology could often be trained, not just treated.
A Shared Philosophy Of Repair
What made the panel compelling was not simply the novelty of each field, but the shared philosophy running through them.
Aganovic argued that the answer to inflammatory skin disorders may lie in restoring missing bacteria. Jalkanen insisted that persistent pain and fatigue often begin with environments designed in ignorance of the body’s needs. Wegerif suggested that a small daily biometric signal could reveal when a life had drifted out of balance long before collapse made the diagnosis obvious.
Different systems, same lesson: health is relational.
The skin requires a microbial ecology. The spine requires movement and support. The nervous system requires cycles of stress and recovery. Again and again, the speakers returned to the idea that the body fails less from lack of intervention than from chronic interference.
This was biohacking stripped of glamour. No fantasy of becoming superhuman. No techno-utopian promise of total control. Instead, a more mature proposition emerged: that human wellbeing depends on rebuilding our partnerships with biology, with movement, with the overlooked signals of discomfort, fatigue and adaptation.
The Future Of Medicine May Be Less Aggressive And More Intelligent
There was something distinctly timely about the discussion, even in 2016. The panel arrived at a moment when medicine, consumer health and technology were all beginning to question older assumptions. Sterility was no longer obviously superior to biodiversity. Comfort was no longer obviously healthy. More exercise was no longer always better. Data was no longer just retrospective, but increasingly predictive.
At its best, the panel on **Biohacking Your Body** did not offer a single doctrine. It offered a correction. Modernity had made many things easier, but not necessarily wiser. In pursuit of convenience, cleanliness and productivity, it had often severed us from the systems that regulate us best.
The speakers at **Biohacker Summit 2016 London** did not ask the audience to reject science. They asked it to apply science more humbly. To see the body not as a machine to overpower, but as an ecosystem to understand.
That may yet prove the most radical biohack of all.
Part of Biohacker Summit 2016 London