Over the years there have been a number of interesting technologies that aimed to help people quit smoking. For instance, a few years ago a ‘smart’ cigarette holder was developed to provide users with data on their smoking habit and offer support to help them quit.
It’s very much in this vein that a new mobile app has been developed by researchers from Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center, who documented their work in a recently published paper. They suggest that the bioage acceleration caused by smoking can be picked up by the kind of data produced by wearable devices. They propose an AI-driven algorithm to then trawl this data for patterns of intraday changes in activity levels.
“It’s fascinating that the profound positive effect of lifestyle changes such as smoking cessation could be observed by analyzing physical activity of a person. A biomarker of age derived from physical activity is a cheap and convenient way to track how biological age reverts back to normal after quitting. Inspired by these findings, we created a free mobile app, Gero Healthspan, that offers real-time monitoring of bioage changes in response to lifestyle interventions. You can use it to explore how lifestyle changes such as diets, activities and supplements affect your predicted healthy life expectancy. We hope that our research and our research-based app will help people to stop deliberately shortening their lives and help to develop healthy lifestyles,” the researchers say.
Spotting the patterns
The researchers analyzed over 100,000 health profiles that had been collected from both the UK Biobank and the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. This database contained a range of information around the activity of people as well as other aspects of their health and lifestyle over the nine year study period.
The study marks the latest attempt to use the standard functionality built into every smartphone to derive valuable insights about our health and wellbeing. Whether this app will deliver tangible improvements in smoking cessation obviously remains to be seen, but it’s the latest in a line of innovations that combine real-time lifestyle data with AI coaching to nudge us towards healthier lifestyles. In that sense, it’s well worth keeping an eye on.
