Revolutionising Workplace Wellness: How Employers Can Leverage the Humanity App

New ways that employers can work with their teams to make positive health actions part of their team culture now include the Humanity app. Longevity, health, and technology meet in Humanity and the healthspan concept, with an aim to add a billion years of healthspan by 2023.

Peoplesafe met with the Humanity team to understand more about their tech and approach…

Humanity was founded in 2000 after the co-founders Peter Ward and Michael Geer came together, having both lost loved ones to early-onset chronic disease. Together they embarked on a journey to discover how they could better protect themselves, and their loved ones, from age-related diseases. They met with some of the world’s leading scientists in the fields of genomics, data science, functional medicine, and longevity science, and considered how to measure and slow down the aging process. Their healthspan concept aims to focus upstream on maintaining bodily function to reduce and potentially eliminate the risk of a range of chronic conditions and diseases.

They launched a consumer app on iOS in 2021, with two functions:

• to monitor the user’s rate of ageing and biological age
• to guide the user to slow this down, or even reverse it

The ageing measures, which pull movement and heart rate data from an iPhone or Apple Watch, were trained against real-world outcomes from longitudinal datasets (e.g. UK Biobank and NHANES) which, they claim, make them as predictive as taking a standard blood test.

The AI-powered app acts as a personalised health coach using gamification and UX/UI to guide the user towards increasing healthspan. Since 2021, the application has gained 200,000 users, a 4.7 app store rating and impressive retention and engagement metrics.

For Pro subscription users Humanity has developed the offering to include blood aging: turning every blood test into an aging test. Users can simply upload their most recent blood test results to the app and get a highly predictive biological age measure. Unlike your chronological age, which is based on when you were born, your biological age represents how old your body is, giving the user an indication of whether they are healthier or less healthy than others their age. By slowing down their biological age, users can take control of their health by reducing their risk of disease and increasing their healthspan (the years of healthy life before they develop an ageing illness).

Humanity’s ambitious undertaking is to increase the user’s healthspan: adding years of healthy life. This centres on users developing their understanding of ageing and ageing in health. People can now better understand whether the actions they are taking are working to improve their health because Humanity is pulling in their movement data (and if available, heart rate data from a compatible wearable) from the past and providing them with a predictive and dynamic Biological Age and Rate of Aging measure.

Following their consumer success, the Humanity team developed a suite of Enterprise products.  For employers, the holistic health and wellbeing app is easy to deploy, inclusive, engaging and proven to positively impact healthy behaviour change. Employees can opt not to share data with the team or share data anonymously to be aggregated with other team members: leaders can then see collective progress without infringing user privacy.

For employers, Humanity helps:

• teams get healthier by taking positive healthy actions & being more likely to adopt and maintain healthier daily habits
• develop healthier daily habits, proven to directly improve workplace productivity and wellbeing
• to reduce absenteeism and presenteeism
• to increase retention and attract talent
• employers to demonstrate investment in their employees’ health and wellbeing

The Humanity app encourages employees and individuals to commit time to access its benefits with a focus on usability. The app only takes a few seconds daily for users to check in to see how they are doing and understand what actions they can take to improve their health that day. There’s no need to open the app to measure their ageing as it automatically pulls in movement and heart rate patterns from their Apple Watch and iPhone.

Personalised guidance can look distinctly different for different users. For a sedentary person in their fifties, the app helps highlight that there are a number of actions they can take to positively impact their health and ageing measure – for example, by simply going for a walk, spending time in natural light and in nature, getting a good night’s sleep or reducing snacking. For a runner in their thirties with high fitness levels, it is likely to highlight the holistic health actions that they are not taking, such as walking instead of being tied to a desk, meditation, checking in with a friend to see how they are doing, increasing their fasting window or adding hot and cold exposure to their daily regimen.

Regardless of users’ baseline health level, nudging them in a positive direction over time can have profound positive health effects. Consistency wins the race, with the Humanity Score boosted by each positive action:

• users earn points for workouts, fasting, meditation, sleep tracking
• a daily metric confirms progress and rewards every holistic health action made throughout the day
• the app guides users on what to do next to have the biggest health impact

For employers wanting to engage with team health, Humanity’s holistic approach fits with diverse needs and brings a community feel to wellness for hybrid teams, engaging all ages and fitness levels: a successful exemplar of harnessing digital and AI technology in a user-friendly app for long-term health outcomes.

Find out more at https://www.humanity.health/