There have been many smartphone startup that claim their app will make you look younger and slimmer. Just open up my phone, and I can see a few: Gyroscope. MyFitnessPal. Welltory. ActivityTracker. SleepCycle. There are many more. There is a health app to fit every need.Today, you can download a new app that claims to slow down your aging.Late last year, we already covered $2.5m of Humanity's seed funding.You can now download the iPhone app in the UK. The Android version is also on the way. The app will be available in the US/Worldwide starting the first week in September. The app is free, but users can subscribe to a premium service for 30 dollars a year. This will allow them to monitor their biological age and take actions that affect it.We'll be covering the app more shortly.The startup, which is based in the UK, is making waves among investors. The startup has raised $2.5 million from 65 investors in health-tech, consumer-tech, and other sectors to bring its total funding to $5m.Alex Tew (Co-Founders at Calm), Michael Acton Smith (CoFounders at Calm), Taavet Hirikus (CoFounder of Wise and founding team for Skype), Robin Thurston, One Way Ventures and 7Percent. Alexander Ljung (CEO, Co-Founder and CEO of Soundcloud), Esther Dyson, a legendary investor in health tech, is one of the investors.Peter Ward and Michael Geer, founders of Humanity, have also established a Science Advisory Board that includes Kristen Fortney (Co-Founder of BioAge), George Church, who helped map the Human Genome, and a Professor at Harvard Medical School. Aubrey de Grey is a pioneer in the aging science movement, Chief Science Officer at SENS Research Foundation.Humanity also used the invite-only strategy that was popularly employed by startups such as Clubhouse to keep the hype building. The app reached over 10k users with a waiting list of tens or thousands.This strategy appears to have paid off. According to the startup, it has now reached its maximum number of TestFlight users (Apples app testing facility) as well as steadily growing its waiting list.Ward and Geer joined forces over two years ago to create an app that would monitor your biological age, give tips and tricks on how you can slow it down or reverse it. This isn't beyond the realm of normal science.Doctors often tell us that exercise, fast food and regular exercise can all help extend our lives. Ward and Geer discovered that standard advice such as drinking more water or walking more could be applied to real-world populations.The Humanity app's secret sauce is not that it will tell if you have aged slower due to having had 8 hours of sleep or something similar. This is because it has compared your data to other people your age and with your health profile. Humanity doesn't draw on the data of other users, but rather on a scientific database.Geer stated that aging is still the most common cause of death worldwide. However, few people understand the relationship between aging and overall health. Most feel helpless to address it. Healthy is a subjective term that is unique to each person. Monitoring your age can give you a holistic indicator of your health. This could reduce the likelihood of developing disease and help extend the lives of millions.Good timing is key to humanity's appearance. The Coronavirus pandemic seems to have reduced life expectancy in England, Wales and the United Kingdom by one year. It also sent it back 10 years for those who were most vulnerable.How does the app work?Humanity describes its app as a Waze-like app. It allows you to navigate your path to a healthier lifestyle, and add years to your fully functional, healthy life. This will allow you to live a longer, but more healthy, life.After you sign up, the app will take you through basic information such as your age and weight. It also links to Apple Health.The app will then give you a Humanity Score (H score) under the four categories of movement, mind recovery and nutrition. According to the startup, the higher your H Score, the more likely it is that you will notice a slowing down or reverse in the aging process.The app can also be connected to sensors on your smartphone or wearables to track data points like heart rate, step rate and sleep. This data is used to calculate your age and biological age. It also analyzes your profile and compares it with data from the UK Bio bank.This is where the special sauce of Humanity lies.According to the startup, its algorithms were validated against real-world results from longitudinal biobanks (including UK Biobank). These biobanks collect anonymized data on the factors that influence a population's lifespan. Humanity claims it uses in-house research and development, as well as collaborations with teams at Gero or Chronomics and partnerships with companies such Illumina and Eurofins.The app uses all this data to make suggestions such as running, meditation, getting more sleep, etc. Although any app can do this, the fact that it draws on real-world data about how your life may be affected gives it a lot more confidence.What about privacy?Geer said over a phone call that health data is some of the most important data you can possess. We try to keep as little of this data on your phone as possible. Your phone is where we run our algorithms. Some of this stuff will need to be sent back to our servers. However, it is encrypted at rest as well as when it is in motion. We keep everything we take to our servers strictly secure.Is Humanity trying to take over other health apps? Is this the end game?Ward explained to me that they are not trying to replace Calm, My Fitness Pal, etc. They are part of the ecosystem with which we will collaborate. We want to be a lighthouse for people using data to see if they are getting better. This kind of data used to only be available to university students. But now, everyone can have the ability to see how their lives compare to that data. This approach is much more powerful than an old-school health app that tells you how many steps to take.There is more to the story. Is there a new way for startups to use the global Bio Bank data that is held in most countries by universities? We may see more startups trying to leverage it in the same way as the Humanity startup. As is often the case, it will be interesting to see how things develop. Humanity is currently ahead of the game in terms of potential competition, but that's just for now.
