I would not have thought this was such big news but a quick Google — thanks to the tip from J. — proved otherwise. Neko Health, the body-scan service that was founded by Spotify founder Daniel Ek, is opening its second location in the Brookfield mall in January. Its Soho location, the first in the US, opened last month. (They already have two in Sweden and six in the UK.)

The company claims to have 50,000 people on the waitlist, but of course we can’t know that for sure to be true (they collect your email for marketing when you sign up). But if so, there are tens of thousands of folks anxious to spend $500 on a body scan! The company announced on Instagram that they have broken ground on two other locations in the city as well. (Ok, and now that I have read the entire website, I think I have to do this thing…)

Founded in Stockholm in 2018, the idea is to use technology to REALLY address preventative health — especially for chronic diseases like cancer and cardiovascular disease. Ek partnered with Hjalmar Nilsonne, an industrial engineer, and the pair assembled a research and engineering team in Sweden to design and assemble four proprietary devices — Derma, Spectrum, Echo, and Neko Lens. When they work together, they create a single scan that captures millions of data points across skin, heart, blood and circulation. (The name comes from the Japanese word for cat — a metaphor for their nine lives.)

For example, the skin scan indexes all of your moles so they can be watched to see if they get bigger over time. The machine measures body fat and the electrical activity of the heart and screens for glaucoma in the eye. They do some in-house follow-up, including ultrasounds and echocardiograms.

They are not revealing how the scanners work, other than to say they are not MRIs or CT scans and do not use radiation. The whole appointment takes an hour — including a review of all your data with a clinician.

They don’t take insurance but you can use an HSA card… More TK.