A smartphone smoke app that offers real-time monitoring of smoking-induced ageing and may help smokers quit the habit.
Quitting smoking increases lifespan and decreases biological age, as measured by DNA methylation. The researchers created the mobile app, Gero Healthspan, that offers real-time monitoring of bioage changes in response to lifestyle interventions.
People can also use it to explore how lifestyle changes such as diets, activities and supplements affect your predicted healthy life expectancy, researchers said.
The bioage acceleration caused by smoking can be detected through the analysis of physical activity signals collected from wearable devices. A new AI algorithm trained to find certain patterns in intra-day changes of activity level to estimate the biological age of a person has been developed.
The study demonstrates that the smoking-induced ageing acceleration reverts back to normal after smoking cessation: the process can be tracked by the wearable device.
“It is fascinating that the profound positive effect of lifestyle changes such as smoking cessation could be observed by analyzing the physical activity of a person,” said Peter Fedichev, founder and Chief Science Officer of Gero.
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, Fedichev said.
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, he said.
The scientists applied machine learning tools to analyse 108,112 health profiles made available by the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey and the UK Biobank.
These large databases contain activity records provided by wearable devices as well as health and lifestyle information, combined with death records up to nine years following the activity monitoring.
By mining the locomotor activity in individuals they extracted a measure of biological age and demonstrated its strong association with remaining lifespan, health span of and the risks of mortality.