Could We Soon Use Apps to Know How Long We Have to Live?
Several people have been asking themselves a hard question on when will they die. The question has been prompting different answers as innovations are on the verge of bringing apps that could predict our lifespan. Besides, predicting life expectancy may significantly affect the lives of people.
However, there may be an abuse of these apps which may lead to invading of people’s privacy. Though as it stands, coming up with an app that will accurately predict one’s life expectancy may be difficult. It may be halted by other factors such as the genetic composition of an individual. But with the new technology that app may be brought to reality.
Calculating life expectancy
Experts have been predicting the life expectancy of a population-based on ethnicity and suburbs. Mechanisms such as artificial intelligence and deep learning can be employed in unravelling compound variables like biomedical information in predicting your biological age. Biological age means how old your body is rather than when you were given birth to. A reliable calculation of life expectancy will need the use of a refined structure which will put lifestyle, geographical, genetics and environmental factors into consideration.
The use of artificial intelligence and machine learning has made it achievable to analyze the bulk of information. Furthermore, the use of cognitive computing and deep learning is helping physicians to make reliable diagnoses as compared to the use of human judgement alone. Using these systems supported with other increasing computational powers and predictive analytics may lead to sophisticated apps that can predict your lifespan.
Is there already an app for this function?
Since there is equipment that can predict cancer survival rates, there may be other upcoming apps that may try to analyze information to predict your life expectancy. However, these apps may not be capable of giving your year of death or even the date you will die. Since human activities and behaviours are hard to predict, it may be not easy to classify, measure and predict expectancy of an individual.
To accurately calculate, predict and measure the life span of an individual, it will require the right quantity and quality of available information. Much of this data, like the ethnicity, gender, age, height and weight, will be obtained from the user whose life expectancy is to be predicted. It could also be boosted with data from the wearables and sensors, which could be vital in tracking blood pressure and heart rates.
Benefits of predicting life expectancy
Life span predictions will be essential to the health providers, governments and individuals. Additionally, they would inform people of their health, whether it’s deteriorating or improving. It would much encourage people to choose a healthy lifestyle.
Besides, pharmaceutical organizations could also use life expectancy information in coordinating medical campaigns. Also, the data could help the government in imposing different taxing methods depending on the life span of an individual.
Will these apps come to reality?
Scientists are tirelessly working on avenues to predict human life span accurately. For this to be successful, it will require efforts from both data scientists, IT experts, health scientists, medical professionals and demographers. However, it will need a collection of enough data for this process to be effective. Though a lot of ethics will also be of the essence since the information will be highly sensitive hence will require a lot of privacy.