Can Wearable Tech Help Increase Our Lifespan?

Scientists predict that we can live until 150 years without notable medical intervention. The key to achieving this isn’t new – eat better and exercise more. However, this is easier said than done. Dietary recommendations seem to evolve while exercising becomes more challenging as we age. How about the benefits of fancy gadgets becoming popular? Is wearable tech healthy? 

Ditch the Food Diaries and Calories Trackers

In 2022, a group of Norwegian scientists studied the effect certain foods have on life expectancy. Some of the results were as follows: 

• Eating more legumes could make human life span one to four years longer. 
• Eating more vegetables could result in either a loss or gain of one year. 
• Eating vegetables is generally good for our health.

The result was confusing. If eating vegetables is good for our body, why is it sometimes associated with a shorter life span? In that case, why do some legume eaters only get an extra year while the others four? 

We need a well-grounded way to measure the nutritional content of the food we eat to live a long and healthy life,  

On the other hand, researchers at Tufts University School of Engineering designed a wearable device in 2018. The gadget can detect specific food molecules, like glucose and salt. The sensor attaches directly to a tooth and transmits radiofrequency waves based on the nutritional molecules it detects. This technology can provide information about what nutrients our bodies are taking in. 

Source: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/adma.201703257

However, this information is only helpful if we know how particular nutrient levels influence health. The food we eat affects everyone differently. Two people might consume the same meal, but their body’s responses can ultimately vary. 

This has prompted health tech researchers to develop wearable technologies to assess the effects of diet in a more accurate manner. In 2020, the Melbourne-based startup Nutronimcs announced its collaboration with the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT). Their goal is to develop an intelligent patch that can monitor nutrition. The smart patch painlessly measures key dietary biomarkers. Then, it sends the information to an app, enabling users to precisely track how their bodies respond to different foods.

“This smart patch is a significant innovation in wearable health monitoring technology,” said Sharath Sriram, RMIT’s Functional Materials and Microsystems Research Group Co-Director.

So, is wearable tech healthy? Well, it is not that you’ll be wearing a tooth-mounted sensor or nutrition-monitoring patch in the next few years, but that doesn’t mean you will benefit from these wearable technologies in the immediate future. 

These wearable sensors can potentially move us away from general food recommendations. Instead, it leads us toward knowing the unique requirements for longer life. 

Wearable Tech Transforms Physical Activity Into A Game

Several ages ago, researchers have known physical activity to achieve a healthy body. Hippocrates and Galen said that a lack of physical exercise was harmful to health. 

In the mid-1900s, researchers studied using daily steps to quantify physical activity. That was the start of the development of step-trackers. 

Twenty years later, the step-tracker market finally hit its stride, primarily due to FitBit. FitBit did something remarkable. Aside from recording daily steps, the device added more features such as goals and achievements.

Many wearable activity trackers quickly followed suit. Two years later, researchers in Denmark investigated more than 120 studies of smart-step trackers. They found out that wearing the devices leads to about 1,200 extra steps per day.

However, it remained unclear whether a few extra steps could increase a person’s lifespan. Then, the Danish researchers finally cleared up the matter. An additional 1,000 steps a day lowers mortality by 6 percent for those already relatively active. For those with a more sedentary lifestyle, 1,000 extra steps can reduce mortality by 36 percent.