Since the advent of modern medicine around 200 years ago, life expectancy worldwide has improved dramatically. Most children born in developed countries in the 21st century are expected to live up to age 100 and beyond. While people living longer is generally a good thing, old age is also associated with chronic diseases, which is a burden to families, communities, and the entire health system, including employers and insurance companies.
However, the challenges posed by longevity have also presented one of the largest opportunities for businesses, especially in the United States. Advances in digital technology have allowed the more precise, accurate, and frequent gathering of lifestyle and activity data, which holds the potential for unparalleled insight into how the human body adapts to living longer and the various challenges that come along with it.
According to Gourab Mukherjee, Co-Founder and CEO of digital health sciences company Aktivo Labs, there are two types of digital health data. The first comes from traditional sources, such as hospital information systems and electronic medical records. While useful, this type of data only presents a snapshot of the patient's condition in the past. The second type, is the data generated on the fly from any device such as smartphones, smartwatches, fitness trackers, or Bluetooth-enabled blood pressure monitors.
To unlock the benefits of this second type of data, Aktivo Labs spent the past 6 years building a real-time digital health platform that aggregates data from different sources, harmonizing it and creating analyses that help populations understand their risk of various chronic conditions, and how they can work with their health providers in preventing them.
As a B2B2C company, Aktivo Labs partners with companies that have a large consumer or employee population in need of digital health solutions. These include life and health insurance companies, employee benefits providers, retailers, banks, and telecom companies.
The Aktivo® platform is centered on the Aktivo Score®, a proprietary digital biomarker for health and longevity. By taking in digital data from the user's devices, it paints a fair picture of the user's day-to-day lifestyle. Its proprietary risk analytics engine then creates a score that can be a predictor for early morbidity and mortality, informing the user about the main risk factors threatening their health, especially as they age. The scoring system was developed under the supervision of Prof. David Lai with a global team of technologists at Aktivo Labs. The system is based on a deeply profiled population health study that sought to understand how lifestyle impacts long-term health itself.
Around the score, Aktivo® has developed multiple modules that help people understand how little changes in lifestyle have large impacts on long-term health. Some of the modules also inform people about self-care and self-management of chronic illnesses, such as diabetes, pre-diabetes, hypertension, and hypercholesterolemia. It also works with clinical psychologists and cognitive behavioral therapists to create modules on how to maintain good mental health.
Future plans include releasing additional modules such as heart health, weight loss, and smoking cessation.
The Aktivo® platform interfaces with its partners, who interact directly with the consumers. Partners can integrate Aktivo® with their existing native applications, either through an application programming interface (API), software development kit (SDK), or progressive web app (PWA).
Aktivo Labs is GDPR- and HIPAA-compliant, and places the highest priority on privacy and security of its clients’ and users’ data.
According to Mukherjee, Aktivo Labs started by working with large corporations that are looking to engage their employee population around health and longevity. Using a very low-touch digital approach, Aktivo Labs requires little to no intervention from the corporate stakeholders.
A year ago, the company secured a US$10 million funding round led by Mitsui & Co., one of Japan’s largest conglomerates, with an interest in health technology, insurance, and finance. Year to date, Aktivo Labs has over one million unique registered users on its platform.
Currently, around 70% of Aktivo Labs’ business is with life and health insurers, helping them better engage with their policyholders, create smarter underwriting and dynamic pricing mechanisms, and build more innovative insurance products.
“Aktivo Labs understands that people can increase their healthy life expectancy by addressing the modifiable risk factors in their day-to-day lives, such as diet, sleep, and exercise,” Mukherjee says. “Through gathering real-time data from the users’ smart devices, we are able to create a biomarker that shows the likelihood of them developing, for example, Type 2 Diabetes within the next five years. Our goal is to partner with various businesses to incentivize people to live longer and healthier lives, doing it in a personalized yet scalable, sustainable, and affordable manner. While it sounds complicated, the core of it is very simple – we want to help people quantify themselves and become mindful of the impact of their daily lifestyle choices on their whole lives, especially now that everyone is living longer.”
Media contact:
Name: Karen Bertoli
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