GeroSense AI tracks biological age and resilience via smartphone sensor data

Reviewed by Emily Henderson, B.Sc.May 11 2021

Gero 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.

Background

Many health apps on our smartphones now provide motivations and compliance metrics for specific health goals. The goals usually are physical activity levels, healthy diet, maintaining healthy sleep, or weight loss.

Physical activity levels, however, dropped dramatically during lockdowns in 2020, and this was not good for health. It is not surprising then, that the number of downloads of health and fitness apps, at the same time, jumped up among health-aware individuals.

With the use of such apps considerably increasing came the urgent need for the whole mobile health and wellness industry to transform and adapt. Wellness services providers need new ways to track how the health actions the users are taking affect their health and longevity.

Every person is different. What helps one, can harm another and be useless for a third one. At the end of the day, neither customers nor even their doctors currently have good chances to navigate through wellness.

GeroSense technology aims to fill this gap by providing a universal tool for measuring physiological parameters based on the most ubiquitous source of data - the mobile and wearable device sensors. This technology enables the creation of a truly personalized health recommendation system: the feedback data loop provided by GeroSense tells the users which lifestyle choices are likely to gain more years of healthy life expectancy personally for them.

How it works

GeroSense is an AI framework that provides purely digital biomarkers of health (aka biological age) and resilience (the recovery rate after stress such as having a cold, exhausting physical activity etc.) based on the universal tool for physiological measurements - step counter which is built-in 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 scientific journal paper.

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. 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."

Peter Fedichev, Co-Founder and CEO, Gero

About GeroSense biomarkers

Physiological parameters used in biological clocks often experience quick changes from day to day. To get a robust measurement of biological age one therefore needs to repeat the measurements and take an average value. This is hardly attainable 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 a totally ambient and non-invasive way. This is why GeroSense can naturally calculate the robust estimation of biological age. On top of that, it uses the breakthrough research by the Gero team and is now the first in the world to estimate the recovery rate based on how quickly physical activity parameters change from day to day.

Biological age is a user-friendly way to understand health risks. Biological age tells you if your body is biologically "younger", and hence your productivity and wellbeing are higher while the chances to develop a chronic or infectious disease are lower than your age-matched peers.

Resilience (or Recovery rate) tells how quickly your body recovers from stresses. Having higher Resilience you will likely need less time to recover from stress, such as vigorous physical activity, lack of sleep, acute infections.

"Th? 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".

What it does for the industry

GeroSense is aiming to start the most wide-scale human trials in the history of humankind: there are several billion smartphones and wearable devices on the planet, and each one of them can become a health and longevity sensor. Thus we'd be finally able to know what works for billions of people - and each person individually.

"I am very excited about partnering with Gero for our longevity clinical trials. 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", - says Anar Isman Co-Founder and CEO of AgelessRx.

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 continuously 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 their mobile application.

An AI-enabled personalization system will allow you to predict which users would benefit and will feel objectively better from using which products the most - you'll get to boost sales and marketing with invaluable insight. Any app partnering with GeroSense will boost the retention in the mobile version, providing users with day-to-day biological feedback on their health changes in response to the use of products/interventions.

"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".