We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Steven Muth a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Steven, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
As a young child, my father, who was driven by money, left our home to focus more on his career. My dad was a very successful investment banker and having no children to care for gave him much more time with his business. Due to this absence, I was driven to be like my father in some ways. I prioritized business and followed the same path for success as an investment banker after school. The other part of me swore to never leave or distance myself from my children and to be completely involved with their lives. When I became an investment banker, I worked relentlessly as a man driven to be the best in the industry and to be successful for myself and all my clients. I was known for my arrogance, confidence, hard work and tenacity, while having a true concern for my customers’ wellbeing. All my business life was valued and quantifiable by financial gains. From this experience, and countless sleepless nights after Zach left, I started ZEM Life Device Company.
The goal of ZEM Life was to change the world with a first-of-its-kind medical technology that could help in the fight against preventable deaths, like accidental overdose. Named after my son, Zachary E Muth, ZEM Life was the product of an overwhelming desire to stop opioid and fentanyl overdoses devastating our country and human life. However, after the development of our technology, we identified many other critical care circumstances. In general, the ZEM Life team had a desire and direction to create a path of mitigation of preventable deaths. Just some of the medical examples that ZEM plans to prevent include heart attacks, snake bites, epilepsy, opioid overdoses, anaphylactic shock, sepsis and many more.
So, how does it work? ZEM’s watch has the ability to read data points including blood oxygen levels with the combination of many other critical care values, as smart watches have today. We then combine this technology with doctor-prescribed medications for your personalized needs or concerns in our patent-pending cartridges. These cartridges have software codes to monitor for specific parameters to determine when the user may be in need of medication injection. If this occurs, an alert would be shown on the watch to give the user the ability to dismiss the injection if it is not needed. If there is no acknowledgment from the user, the watch will administer the medication and send a GPS signal to authorities.
With the proper delivery of pre-loaded medications, ZEM Life device can be the difference between life and death. This is what ZEM Life is all about, saving lives! We are proud to be the leader in a new industry of bringing automatic life-saving devices to market. This technology was not something that I could have created myself. My co-founder, Joanna Sawyer, MD, is an anesthesiologist who really brought this idea to life and provided the medical expertise to make it happen. Not only that, but her sons joined our mission as well and used their engineering backgrounds to create the perfect team. More on that later!
I am so proud of not only the technology we have created, but that team that I get to do it with. Our group is not driven by financial gains. In fact, the entire team is working at minimum wage so that we can continue to prioritize other aspects of bringing this life-saving device to market. We all have a common mission and that is to SAVE LIVES.
It is my hope to create an awareness of ZEM Life and to be recognized and known as the most attractive and highest quality asset appreciation company, similar to Rolex, with the market share and user-friendly innovation of Apple.
How’d you meet your business partner?
This is a good question and one that I love to share! For many, they would say this meeting was something miraculous. It was as if all the perfect ingredients to create ZEM Life came together in the most organic, perfect way possible.
In just a few months’ time, I had lost my mother, my only son Zach, and my sister Lisa. Then, on top of this pain, I found out that my girlfriend, whom I planned to marry, was unfaithful to our relationship, creating more shifts in my personal life. However, it felt understandable as I was not the same person I was before. At the time, I was told by my new friends to get into my faith and to look there to help relieve the pain, but nothing happened. The pain from my losses was still there. As a last-ditch effort, I googled ‘how to get into my faith.’ The internet said something so simple, just read the bible. So, I began to read that very night. Wow! For the first time, I felt some warmth and comfort from my losses and began to feel like it was going to be okay. It felt so good to have my strong confidence come back. It was different, of course, as I was adjusting to regaining peace in my new life. I was looking forward to starting this new journey and posted my name on an unknown dating site. I only wrote the words, “I do not have time to text or write but if you want to meet, I will be interested in that only.” The next day I get a message from a woman named Joanna. She explained that she too is very busy and has no time but said let’s meet anyways. So, we did! She was perfect in all ways, and we began to talk about Zach and I told her about all my recent research to make a watch to alarm people if they were at medical risk. Joanna, being an anesthesiologist, said let’s put the lifesaving medication in the watch also. WOW! It just made so much sense. As if the pieces weren’t already coming together so perfectly, she then told me her sons were both great engineers and perfect for this task as they had focuses in mechanical and software engineering. With Joanna’s medical background, myself a very driven business development person, and her sons’ engineering backgrounds, the dream team was created!
Although it was a rough road to get to this point, I was now filled with such joy, confidence, and hope to make a positive difference in the world.
Have you ever had to pivot?
Was there a defining moment in your professional career? A moment that changed the trajectory of your career? If so, please share the backstory so we can fully understand and appreciate the moment and take in any lessons or wisdom that might be learned from your experience and story
Yes, there were many revelations during my career that disrupted the trajectory of my professional life! However, nothing was more substantial than my most recent event which has cemented and fully changed my life and direction both personally and professionally. This new event will keep me steadfast until the last day of my life! My only child, best friend and business partner, Zachary E Muth, passed away due to an accidental fentanyl ingestion on February 1, 2021. Having this experience showed me LIFE IS SHORT and that all of us have so much more to look forward to than what money can buy. This is my new direction and purpose, to work for the good of others and the world we currently live in. Immediately after Zach left many crazy things took place. One event was me coming down with COVID just days after he left, which forced me to quarantine for weeks. I was sleepless in thoughts of how I could have saved Zach. I dreamed of ways I could have protected him and where he could be today. I began studying a lot in physics during this time. This research led me to begin thinking of ways I could help others moving forward. It also gave me great insight into the world around us and outside of us. This new information helped me understand more about what would eventually become ZEM Life, a company that I co-founded in Zach’s honor.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.zemlifedevice.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/zem.life/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/people/ZEM-Life/61560703794169/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@ZemLifeDevice
Image Credits
ZEM Life