Phone, smart watch can reveal your biological age

With data collected from wearable devices & cellphones, AI can predict your biomarkers of ageing

Artificial intelligence (AI) can produce digital biomarkers of ageing and frailty by gathering physical activity data from smartphones and other wearables, scientists have found. The finding untaps the emerging potential of combining wearable sensors and AI technologies for continuous health risk monitoring with real-time feedback to life and health insurance, healthcare and wellness providers.

“Artificial Intelligence is a powerful tool in pattern recognition and has demonstrated outstanding performance in visual object identification, speech recognition, and other fields,” said Peter Fedichev from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT) in Russia.

“Recent promising examples in the field of medicine include neural networks showing cardiologist-level performance in detection of arrhythmia in ECG data, deriving biomarkers of age from clinical blood biochemistry, and predicting mortality based on electronic medical records,” said Fedichev. The researchers analysed physical activity records and clinical data from a large 20032006 US National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES). They trained neural network to predict biological age and mortality risk of the participants from oneweek long stream of activity measurements.

“Combination of ageing theory with the most powerful modern machine learning tools will produce even better health risks models to mitigate longevity risks in insurance, help in pension planning, and contribute to upcoming clinical trials and future deployment of antiageing therapies,” he said.