Apple's 'Health Age' Feature Draws Skepticism From Wearable Reviewer
Apple plans to add a 'Health Age' longevity metric to its Health app later this year. A Verge reviewer argues such wearable age scores are arbitrary, inconsistent, and used more for bragging than for health insight.
Victoria Song, a senior reviewer at The Verge, wrote in the newsletter Optimizer on September 16 that she let out a distinct "Noooo!" inside the Steve Jobs Theater during Apple's Apple Watch announcement last week, when the company introduced the longevity feature alongside a new readiness metric and a redesigned Health app. Apple says Health Age will arrive later this year, according to The Verge.
The concept is already widespread in wearables and health tech. Whoop offers a "Whoop age," Oura a "cardiovascular age" metric, Withings recently added separate "heart age" and "vascular age" measures as part of what it calls longevity intelligence features, and Garmin has a "fitness age score." Song wrote that at CES she sat in front of a longevity mirror that estimated her "physiological age" and "facial skin age" from a 30-second selfie, and that earlier this week her $5,000 smart mattress topper estimated her "biological age."
The numbers she has received diverge sharply. Whoop puts her at 42. Oura has placed her heart anywhere from seven years younger to 1.5 years younger than her chronological age, and currently says two years younger. Withings says her vascular age is a year older than she is, while her heart is four years younger. Garmin says her fitness age is 36.5. The longevity mirror put her facial skin age at 26 and her physiological age at 35, and her mattress said she was "trending older" this week at 38.7. Song is 38. "And that's what I'm sticking with," she wrote.
Song said she would not rule on Apple's version of the feature until she can test it herself, and that such metrics can be genuinely helpful depending on how they are framed. She noted that physiological condition can differ among people of the same age through diet, sleep and exercise, and that a score can point to areas for improvement. Her own Whoop age, she wrote, is relatively unfavorable because the algorithm weighs strength training heavily and she had been focusing on cardio; lifting weights would have been an easy way to tilt the number. Making her training more balanced would objectively benefit her long-term health, she added.
In practice, however, Song wrote that the scores tend to serve the ego. People rarely discuss an older health age and treat it as shameful even though it is not, she wrote, while a younger one becomes something to show off. She pointed to Apple's vice president of health, Sumbul Desai, saying in an Instagram Reel that Health Age could be something users brag about to friends, and to tech entrepreneur Bryan Johnson, 49, who posted on X a chart titled "Is Bryan Johnson More 18 or 49?" alongside an argument that aliens would struggle to tell him apart from his teenage son.
Song also noted that a wearable-derived age does not capture the whole picture. A person could game the Whoop Age metric and still learn at an annual physical that their cholesterol is extremely high, a situation she said a reader once described to her. Someone could optimize the controllable factors of diet, exercise and sleep as Johnson has and still develop autoimmune gastritis, which Johnson has. Some of a person's health is encoded in genetics, and while odds can be improved, the eventual outcome is not always a matter of choice, she wrote.