Data from just 6 minutes of walking, collected using smartphone motion sensors, may be enough to predict someone’s risk of dying in the next five years.
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Previous studies have assessed mortality risk using daily physical activity level, measured by wearable motion sensors in devices such as fitness watches. However, despite the growing popularity of smartwatches, they are still mostly worn by an affluent minority.
“Most people own smartphones with similar sensors, but calculating mortality risk from the activity data they collect is difficult because people don’t tend to carry their phones around all day,” said Bruce Schatz of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
To find an alternative predictor that can be measured using smartphones, Schatz and his colleagues examined data from over 100,000 participants in the British Biobank study, which collected information on the health of middle-aged and older adults living in the UK for more than 15 years. As part of this study, participants wore motion sensors on their wrists for a week. About 2% of the participants died over the next five years.
The researchers ran motion and death sensor data on about a tenth of the participants using a machine learning model, which developed an algorithm that estimated five-year mortality risk using acceleration during a 6-minute walk. “For many diseases, especially heart or lung diseases, there is a very typical pattern where people slow down when they are out of breath and speed up again in short doses,” says Schatz.