GeroSense AI app will track biological age and recovery rate biomarkers to predict biological age acceleration.

Singapore-based Gero has announced it has developed and validated GeroSense AI to track biological age and resilience via smartphone sensor data. The performance of the new health and aging markers have been recently reported in a paper in Aging US.

Longevity.Techology: Almost a year ago to the day, we interviewed Peter Fedichev about how longevity start-up Gero’s platform leveraged theoretical physics to catalyse drug discovery. Now things have jumped from the theoretical to the physical, with an AI model that uses wearables and smartphones to quantify digital biomarkers and predict biological aging and morbidity risk.

Smartphones are crammed with health apps that motivate and monitor specific health goals and general fitness, checking physical activity levels, diet, sleep, or weight loss. Lockdown may have caused physical activity levels to drop, but the downloads of health and fitness apps jumped as awareness of tracking personal healthspan was spotlighted by the pandemic.

The move towards personalised health apps means that wellness services providers need new ways to track how the health actions the users are taking affect their health and longevity. After all, every person is different, so the data – and the predictions and recommendations – must be too.

GeroSense technology aims to fill this gap by providing a universal tool for measuring physiological parameters based on what has become a ubiquitous source of data – the mobile and wearable device sensors. GeroSense technology enables the creation of a personalised health recommendation system, as the feedback data loop provided by the API tells the users which lifestyle choices are likely to gain more years of healthy life expectancy personally for them.

How the app works

GeroSense is an AI framework that provides purely digital biomarkers of health (your biological age) and resilience (the recovery rate after stress such as suffering an illness or exhausting physical activity, &c) based on the universal tool for physiological measurements – the step counter. This is in-built in almost all modern mobile devices; instead of simply counting the total number of steps taken each day, GeroSense finds specific patterns associated with changes in healthy life expectancy by monitoring human spontaneous or leisure time physical activity during the day.

Based on these patterns, GeroSense predicts biological age acceleration in years of life gained or lost due to healthy or unhealthy lifestyle and nutrition choices. The GeroSense model and its validation tests have been published in Aging US.

“GeroSense predicts biological age as well as how stable it is and how quickly it will likely change so that we can timely detect anomalies due to changes in lifestyle or health status,” says Peter Fedichev, Co-founder and CEO of Gero. “This became only possible thanks to non-invasive wearable technology, yet with accuracy similar to that of invasive tests as validated in our recent scientific paper [1].”

About GeroSense biomarkers

Physiological parameters used in biological clocks often experience quick changes from day-to-day; in order to achieve an accurate measurement of biological age, repeated measurements need to be taken, something which is not ideal for invasive methods such as blood tests.

GeroSense aims to fill the gap. The technology relies on consumer-grade mobile and wearable devices: smartphones and smartwatches measure heart rate and physical activity every day in an ambient and non-invasive way. This allows GeroSense to calculate a robust, non-invasive estimation of biological age. In addition, it uses breakthrough research by the Gero team, meaning, according to Gero, it is the first in the world to estimate the recovery rate based on how quickly physical activity parameters change from day-to-day.

“The GeroSense technology has transformative potential and may democratize applications of aging biomarkers,” says Brian Kennedy, Distinguished Professor of Biochemistry and Physiology at National University Singapore. “One can think of applications in large-scale population studies (including clinical trials), personalization of lifestyles, and other anti-aging interventions for wellness or risk assessment in insurance [1].”

Transforming the industry

GeroSense is aiming to start the most wide-scale human trials ever; there are several billion smartphones and wearable devices on the planet, and each one of them can become a health and longevity sensor. It would become possible to understand what works for billions of people – as well as each person individually.

“I am very excited about partnering with Gero for our longevity clinical trials,” says Anar Isman Co-founder and CEO of AgelessRx. “To accelerate the progress of slowing down aging, the concept of longevity must become mainstream, and giving consumers easily available and simple to understand tools based on the sensory data is the most likely way to do that [1].”

GeroSense biological age and resilience markers are available on the Gero web server via API for integration in any mobile health and fitness application. Gero research team plans to constantly improve the GeroSense digital biomarkers and is also seeking collaborations with academic and industrial researchers to achieve this goal.

GeroSense powers the biological age calculation and estimation of resilience in the GeroSense app available for iPhone users on the App Store. The GeroSense app can serve as an alternative way for the integration of biological age feedback to wellness service providers who do not have mobile application.

“After submerging ourselves in the science over the last few years, we have become convinced that what Peter, Maxim, Tim, and team have created with digital markers is the future for truly knowing the state of health of every human on earth,” says Michael Geer, Co-founder & CSO of Humanity Inc. “We combine GeroSense with other clinical and genetic biomarkers and models also built on longitudinal datasets, to bring our users full coverage to guide themselves to true functional youth and health [1].”

We have an exclusive interview with Peter Fedichev coming soon – stay tuned!
[1] https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2021-05/g-gag050821.php

Images courtesy of Gero