Wellness App Eterly Gives Users a Daily Longevity Score

What if you could see how your daily lifestyle choices affect not just your immediate health, but your longevity? Canadian tech startup Eterly is doing just that with their app, which gives users a “longevity score” based on their everyday lifestyle choices. The app collects data through manual entry (for example, meal information) and wearable devices, and uses advanced algorithms to calculate the effect a user’s lifestyle has on their longevity. The app also includes an AI-powered “assistant” who makes personalized suggestions about how each user can improve their score. For example, the app might suggest that a user who is otherwise healthy but could improve their sleep habits go to bed an hour earlier.

As well as monitoring steps, heart rate, and sleep, Eterly employs an intelligent chatbot that prompts users for information about their eating habits, vitamin intake, and even their mood. It then assigns each user with a unique, algorithmically determined ‘Longevity Score’, which is updated on a daily basis.

Eterly founder Andrew Ahachinsky hopes that patients will be motivated to practice healthier habits by greater knowledge of the effects that their lifestyle has on their longevity, but it that isn’t enough motivation, the program also offers users virtual tokens for healthy behavior.

Users will be able to ‘mine’ tokens by achieving their health and fitness goals designed and delivered to them by the AI-driven chatbot, which acts like a virtual personal trainer…

The pair concluded that the blockchain could help solve many of the issues that Eterly would inevitably confront, for example, by rewarding user behaviour via token mining, building a ‘longevity marketplace’, anonymous health data storage, and data sharing, using a permissioned blockchain protocol.

The app’s premise is founded on research that suggests that lifestyle factors, rather than genetic ones, play the largest role in increasing overall lifespan. With the launch of its app, Eterly has entered the ring of futuristic solutions seeking to “cure” aging. Although these solutions are unproven, Ahachinsky believes that the app can play a role in helping people stay healthier for longer.

Various studies, including research carried out by the University of Gothenburg, have suggested that it is lifestyle factors rather than genetics that play a critical role in life extension, and importantly, enjoying a healthier longer life. It is hardly surprising then that the longevity industry is starting to boom, driven primarily by advances in technology.

Alongside groundbreaking developments such as stem cell therapy, part of a market forecast to reach $15.63 billion in value by 2025 and a nutraceuticals market set to be worth $300 billion by 2022, many scientists are coming to the conclusion that ageing can be ‘treated’ just like any other disease, and that it is even possible to reverse the process of ageing.

Whilst this theory is not yet proven, the team at Eterly, and their advisors, including a number of reputable scientists, believe that Eterly can put people in control of their healthy lives, and give them the tools they need to take every precaution against disease and ill health, whilst at the same time helping provide data and fund research into curing diseases.