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Michael Geer is co-founder and CSO (Chief Strategy Officer) of Humanity Health, a London-based startup that's building an iPhone app and subscription service designed to help users slow or reverse their rate of aging. Geer's co-founder Pete Ward has described the app as like “Waze for maximizing health span," or years of healthy functioning. 

The Humanity iPhone app, which is currently being beta-tested by users in the UK, is designed to track various types of health-related data for free, such as exercise levels. At various premium subscription levels users will be able to track biomarkers in their blood samples and even track the levels of methylation in their DNA. The app’s machine learning algorithms pull together all of this data to produce what the company calls an “H Score.” The big idea is to show well users are doing at slowing their aging—compared to others who have similar profiles or have taken similar actions—and to advise users on what else they could be doing to increase their H Score and their health span.

Harry interviews Geer about the startup's origin story, the app's features, Humanity Health's business model, and the argument for better integration of clinical and digital data into consumers' everyday health decisions.

You can find more details about this episode, as well as the entire run of MoneyBall Medicine's 50+ episodes, at https://glorikian.com/moneyball-medicine-podcast/

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TRANSCRIPT

Harry Glorikian: On Star Trek the Vulcans have a saying: Live long and prosper. The “AND prosper” part is important, because nobody wants to live a long life, if it comes at the expense of their health and prosperity.

In fact, there’s a growing notion in the healthcare industry what you should really be trying to optimize isn’t your lifespan but your “healthspan,” meaning, the number of years of healthy functioning you can look forward to. 

And that’s the main idea behind a new smartphone app and subscription service being developed by startup based in London called Humanity Health. The company came out of stealth mode in the UK last fall.  It’s testing its iPhone app on beta users in the UK now and will soon open up to users in the US.

The way Humanity’s CEO and co-founder Michael Geer explains it, we can’t affect our chronological age, but we can affect our biological age, if we take the right steps to st