Idea

Ageing clock based on extremely large statistics from people with similar genomes and lifestyle

jnikola Jul 26, 2022

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A service and application that calculates how long will you naturally live by complex AI-driven computation based on matching your genome sequence, medical documentation, lifestyle, country, habits, etc. with other people and performing statistical analysis to predict your age of death.
Why?
to help people plan their life better
to help people engage in ageing research
to help people diagnose or prevent diseases
to help insurance companies and conutries to calculate the price of health insurance
How would it work?
People who want to know how much time they have would sign the contract with a company that would then collect all their data regarding: age, medical history, job, education, relationships, food and drinks consumation,consumptionfree time, lifestyle, country, etc. They would also allow a person to do the genome sequencing and to use many smart gadgets for free to collect more specific data and match it with other people more with greater precision. 
The service would than simply compare people by these parameters, both live and dead, and use all of them to predict the age of death. For example, if a person in my country which does sports, eats organic food once a week, goes to faculty, is in a healthy relationship, doesn't smoke, occasionaly drink, has backpain problems and often rides a bike is compared to people who had similar lifestyle who died at the age 88, its life expectancy is also around 88 with 86% of chance.
Problems
privacy of the data - data about your name, ID number or anything that can relate your data with you would never be collected
data security - where should this kind of data be stored to keep it safe from hackers?
At the beginning, mentioned parameters and smaller amount of people would probably not be enough to reach great precision of the results. However, since the number of people is huge, the ageing is becoming really trendy and people use gadgets more and more, the future is bright for a service like this to be not only beneficial for the individual, but to help solving some of the most important issues (cancers, obesity, diabetes, ...).
Can you think of more parameters that should be involved in calculations?
Do you know about anything similar?

ageing clock business ideas ageing

Creative contributions

Generate a Healthy Habits Trend

Oguntola Tobi Jul 27, 2022

I think this idea is best used to create a healthy habits trend. For instance, if your habits, lifestyle, environment, health history, and diet predispose you to an early death, which you don't want, you will make the necessary changes: change your environment, eat better, be more intentional with exercising and lifestyle choices, etc.
Also, I think it would be great if the service can provide pointers on what to do. This can be AI-driven or human-driven. I personally would prefer if it is human-driven.
If it catches on and becomes a trend, I see it as helping many people more conscious of their life choices and how it affects them. I also see it as helping people making better choices and living healthier lives.
Great idea!

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jnikola2 years ago

Great application! I am almost sure this would work. Also, as Florin Buda mentioned, we need a tool to be fast so that people can play with it and see how their lifestyle changes could affect their lifespan, all based on heavy comprehensive statistics). 
It could also fit into Darko Savic's problem of how to engage young people in doing research on ageing.

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Florin Buda2 years ago

I like this! The output should be like this:
In average people with your habbits live about 60 years.
To add 10 years: quit alcohol.
To add 7 years: reduce alcohol to 2 beers per week.
To add 5 years: quit red meat.
To add 5 years: start exercizing once per week.
etc...
The application could recalculate everything at a push of a button: "i stopped drinking", "i bought a motocycle", "i bought an ergonomic chair"

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Oguntola Tobi2 years ago

Florin Buda You certainly understand what I'm driving at.

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One problem related to degrees of freedom

Subash Chapagain Jul 27, 2022

Though the proposed idea would be indeed helpful in a large-scale statistical model, I have a few concerns about its predictive capacity, and the psychological/emotional implications, especially at the individual level.
How does the system account for random events that might be detrimental to health?
When it comes to predicting overall health and fitness (physical), sampling from individual's blood, urine or tissue analysis can offer some insight, but not fully. Based on the ecology and environment, the individual is interacting with, the diet s/he consumes, some level of prediction can seem plausible. However, some events are extremely random and offer no room for prediction. For instance, infectious disease. No infectious disease can be confidently predicted. Though models could be used from past occurrences, they are only vaguely correct. Besides, there is always a hidden pathogen: a virus yet to be contracted, a bacteria yet to be discovered.
This calls for the question: how can such a system predict an individual's likelihood to contract an infectious disease? 
What happens when the system gives wrong predictions?
For the reason I mentioned in the question above, there are always more degrees of freedom for the system to operate and hence more ways for it to make predictions that are not accurate. What happens when the system says I have five more months to live when I feel perfectly healthy? How does it account for random events like accidents? How would the society confront the notion of having a 'time frame' for life left to live?
These are in my opinion very serious and philosophical questions we need to ask if we want to use this kind of service.

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jnikola2 years ago

I think the questions you raised are great! 
What I thought to be the answer to your first question would be the enormous number of users the model would be trained on. Hopefully, with a great number of people, statistics could be more precise. On the other hand, the model should predict only the naturally occurring death. The individual's likelihood to contract an infectious disease could be calculated by implementing some health-related data, but it would probably be an additional feature for entertainment.
The second question is similar to the first one, so some of the answers from the first paragraph could fit here, too. The system would come with a disclaimer to take all the information with caution since it's purely statistics-derived. In the same way people confront the information about global warming, nuclear war or pandemics, the people would be confronted with serious predictions here, I agree. However, my idea was to design the app to enforce healthier living (the same as Oguntola Tobi proposed here) and not the general fear of dying too soon. But it's an important issue to be addressed.

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Shubhankar Kulkarni2 years ago

The geographical location of the person can partially take care of the probability of mortality risk due to infectious diseases. For example, a person staying and spending most of their time in a crowded city is at an increased risk of infection (based on COVID experience) than someone staying in a sparsely populated area. Also, infections are more serious with age, another parameter that we have taken into account. The geographical location will also take into account the proportion of fatal road accidents and other seemingly unpredictable reasons for mortality. Some cities have higher accident rates than others, higher crime rates (involving death), etc. They can be used to improve the accuracy of the data.
However, what you say about psychological/emotional implications can be a serious issue. Even though the test results mention in bold that this is just a prediction based on statistics and is not your destiny, a proportion of people will panic. Maybe use this test as a game. Words like "game" and "competition" take off some pressure and may motivate people in improving their lifestyles.

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Oguntola Tobi2 years ago

I don't think such predictions should be taken as gospel. Unless it's magic, nobody can make such a binding decision anyway. The way I see it, people who engage in this service will know that there are certain parameters that won't be included, like accidents and infectious diseases. The service provider should include these disclaimers all the same so people will not have any doubt.

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Occupational hazards

Shubhankar Kulkarni Aug 12, 2022

Occupational hazards are important for certain occupations like construction workers, army personnel, etc., and also those who spend a lot of time sitting in one place. This coupled with the geographical location will provide better accuracy of "time of death" (This could be a great name for the app/ test, although it showcases a morbid sense of humor :) ) For example, if you want to be a leader (prime minister/ president/ chancellor), you might want to check where your country lies in the list of countries with the highest number of leader assassinations. 

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assassinated_and_executed_heads_of_state_and_government

[2]https://www.quora.com/What-country-has-had-the-most-assassinated-presidents

[3]https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/15311/which-country-in-history-has-had-the-highest-number-of-presidential-assassinatio

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General comments

Shubhankar Kulkarni2 years ago

Great idea! The real "time of death" of people who have used this test could be tracked. The difference between the actual and predicted time of death could be analyzed and appropriate constants and factors could be added to improve the accuracy of the test.

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jnikola2 years ago

Shubhankar Kulkarni Great idea! These comparisons could not only improve the accuracy of the prediction system but also improve the accuracy of predictions concerning life adjustments. If a person stopped smoking, it could be sort of proof that it can really prolong the lifespan (or healthspan in the advanced version of the app).