With the COVID-19 pandemic and the digitisation of the modern world, an increasing number of people are turning to technology to take ownership of their health. In our biological age diagnostics report, we took a deep dive into the longevity companies that are using tech to track the biomarkers of aging. So how can digital technology help you take control of your health and longevity?
Digital health for longevity
The surge in technological innovation so far in the 21st century has made people more connected than ever before. New tech is also providing innovative solutions to help improve health. Known as digital health, technology is making health more democratized and personalised, allowing access to healthcare even in the remotest corners of the world.
Wearables, apps and trackers, powered by AI, help people to continuously monitor their health biomarkers, revolutionising life for those with metabolic conditions like diabetes, as well as those looking to prolong their health and lifespan generally.
Biological age diagnostics is a branch of digital health that tracks your biological age – your age according to your health status, rather than your chronological age, or how many years you have lived on the planet. Different people age differently depending on genetics, lifestyle factors or a combination of both – known as epigenetics. Aging is a natural process that is unfortunately accompanied by an accumulation of cellular and molecular damage, leading to increased risk of age-related disease.
The current health system focusses on treating people when they are ill, rather than preventing them from getting sick in the first place. By tracking your biological age, you can implement different longevity interventions before you get ill. This will hopefully hasten the transition towards preventative healthcare from the current ‘disease-care’ system.
Read more about biological age diagnostics in our report HERE.
Chronological versus biological age
Deep Longevity, a spin-off from Insilico Medicine, is a leader in the biological age diagnostics field. Created in 2020 by Insilico’s Dr Alex Zhavoronkov along with a group of AI-enthusiasts, Deep Longevity uses AI to predict peoples’ biological age and health. This gives deeper insight into aging than simply how many birthdays you have celebrated.
Deep Longevity uses a variety of blood test, epigenetic, behavioural, wearable and imaging data to power deep aging clocks designed to track our ever-changing biological age.
“Biology of a living organism is a dynamic process with trillions of features changing in time at the atomic, molecular, cellular, tissue, organ, system, organismal and environmental levels,” explains Zhavoronkov. “And the best way to study biology is to track all these features in time at the highest resolution possible to understand the causality and the intimate interplay of these features.”
Deep Longevity has developed several ‘clocks’ to keep track of all your antiaging needs. By bringing together different types of data in these clocks, Deep Longevity’s technology can tell us a lot more about our individual aging processes. Its aging clock technology quantifies the aging process and serves as a yardstick for antiaging interventions. Its deep-learning models offer insight into how to slow down each person’s aging trajectory.
“We have developed a very large number of aging clocks using multiple data types, many of them published, patented and tested in a broad range of applications. This experience allows us to tap into a broad range of industries such as healthcare, clinical, consumer, life insurance and even psychology.
“Our mission is to extend healthy productive longevity and we are developing a new field of longevity medicine, in which the objective is not only to prevent disease, but also to keep the individual as close to the age of optimal performance during the entire life span as possible.”
AI and antiaging
Artificial intelligence, or AI, makes it possible for machines to learn from experience and perform human-like tasks. Its potential applications in healthcare are endless. Rather than far-off visions of AI-powered robot carers, artificial intelligence is revolutionising personalised healthcare today.
Deep Longevity’s first consumer product, Young.AI, helps people track their real biological age from the comfort of their mobile phones. Using the latest AI technologies, the mobile app provides powerful insights into your biological age that you can use to reverse aging and live longer. The AI interprets the users’ data to form a holistic health profile.
It then provides information and recommendations to improve health. Uniting doctors, hospitals and wellness centres in one central cloud platform, the app provides people with more health and longevity information than ever before.
Young.AI’s easy digital health app
In the current ‘disease-care’ system, regular health check ups do not provide enough information to benefit patients before diseases start. One solution is digital health, which can track users’ biometric data and calculate their biological age as well as track the effect of different interventions. EHealth apps like Young.AI provides deeper aging insight, tracking Blood Age, Photo Age, Mind Age and Behavioural Age.
Young.AI’s healthcare service is simplified to four easy steps:
- Discover your real biological age. Add data, like selfies and recent blood tests, to gain more insight about your health.
- Access your personalised longevity strategy. Based on uploaded the data, the AI algorithms will provide a personalised, science-based longevity plan just for you.
- Complete your health to-do list. The app provides easy-to-do tasks that replace harmful habits with healthier ones.
- Rejuvenate! Continuously track your progress in the app and upload more data to get more predictions.
