The dacadoo health platform calculates your personal dacadoo health score – a number from 1 (low) to 1’000 (high) that represents your current health and fitness status in real-time. When tracked over time, the dacadoo health score offers a good directional relative indicator of how your health and fitness is improving or deteriorating.
The dacadoo health score has been developed by dacadoo in collaboration with a professor and former long-term scientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston. The score is based on about 72 million man-years of clinical data and incorporates many of the well-known and validated cardio- and cerebrovascular risk studies and quality of life assessment tools.
The dacadoo health score is not a diagnostic tool that substitutes the diagnosis of a medical professional. However, an individual with a dacadoo health score of 600 is likely to be doing better, from a health and fitness perspective, than someone with a score of 300.
Fundamentally, the dacadoo health score is based on three key pillars:
My Activities
This pillar of the dacadoo health score is all about your lifestyle choices with regards to physical activity & fitness, stress, food & nutrition and quality of sleep. All these life influencing factors are interrelated; they influence each other and the resulting dacadoo health score.
The dacadoo health platform is currently live with its fitness tracking module. The additional modules for food & nutrition, stress and sleep quality will follow soon.
Exercise and other activities affect health directly, but only when done consistently and only in a delayed fashion. dacadoo has developed a model that accounts for these qualities in a medically realistic fashion. It consists of a health pool, a bonus pool and a daily decay.
To understand it easily, think of it as two water containers (health and bonus pool) that are draining continuously (daily decay). When exercising, your containers fill with water and build reserves. When you rest or do not exercise, your containers will reduce in size due to the continuous training (daily decay) but at different moments: first, your bonus pool (that works as a buffer) will empty without affecting the health pool, then the health pool will start to empty.
Only the health pool will affect your dacadoo health score. The health pool will increase your dacadoo health score with exercise and will decrease it when emptying. So always try to keep your bonus pool higher than your daily decay to maintain your score.
The amount of daily decay depends on the amount of your activities. It thus takes more effort to maintain a higher score.
My Emotions
Together with a growing portion of the medical community, dacadoo believes that a critical measure of a person’s health is how he or she feels about himself or herself.
This second pillar of the dacadoo health score measures your quality of life through a self-assessment questionnaire, currently formulated as 27 questions. With this questionnaire, dacadoo derives quantitative measures of key aspects of your health such as depression and stress.
The dacadoo quality of life questionnaire is primarily influenced by existing self-assessment questionnaires such as the SF-36 survey developed by the Medical Outcomes Study in the US, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the US Center for Disease Control (CDC) quality of life questionnaires. In addition, 3’240 surveys to test the dacadoo quality of life questionnaire were completed by the international membership of ProMed and the International Society for Infectious Diseases in 2011 which helped a lot in the model-building and refine the model.
When filling in the Quality of Life questionnaire for the first time, the questions are asked in an absolute sense and the answers you provide are recorded as is. From then on, you should periodically update the Quality of Life questionnaire, say every few weeks to months. On each update, the questions are asked in a relative sense. You should answer them by looking at how your quality of life has changed since the previous time you have filled in the questionnaire. The date of your previous update is also indicated at the top of the questionnaire for your convenience. All sliders are initially positioned in the middle. For a question where nothing has changed, you can leave the slider in the middle. If your answer to a question is less so or more so since the last time you have filled in the questionnaire, you can indicate this by moving the respective slider towards the left or towards the right. This will be applied as an incremental change to all the answers you have previously given.
Unlike more traditional questionnaire-based approaches, where questions are assigned ad-hoc weights based on the researcher’s belief on the relevance of each question, the dacadoo quality of life questionnaire was derived and validated from a large study carried out by dacadoo. This allows dacadoo to derive important risk factors, especially the levels of depression and stress experienced by an individual, to be used as input for other models. In addition, unlike traditional quality of life models that produce a single static value, the dacadoo quality of life scores are dynamically and continuously updated through periodic user input, reflecting changes in the user’s perception and general feeling of wellness, and thus represent reality more accurately.
My Body
This pillar of the dacadoo health score measures your body in terms of your gender, age, height, weight, blood pressure, cholesterol, blood glucose and other derived parameters. These are objective values that dacadoo uses in conjunction with internationally and widely validated medical studies to derive a medically-accurate measure of your health. This combination of your data and dacadoo’s analysis indicates who you are and enables dacadoo to calculate an initial personal dacadoo health score for you.
To define your body, we use two sets of models: a metric model and a general model:
- In the metric model we calculate all your measurable data such as gender, age, height, weight, blood pressure, cholesterol, blood glucose and other derived parameters.
- In the general model we round off and broaden the validity and accuracy of the metric model through a more general set of health related metrics, including data and recent research results concerning the prediction of possible long-term health expenditures from a relatively small set of baseline inputs.
This pillar of the dacadoo health score is based on published and validated clinical data from various risk models (e.g. FRAMINGHAM Heart Study, the ASSIGN model, the REYNOLDS models, the PROCAM models, the SCORE model, etc.) which help predict the likelihood of having a cardiovascular or cerebrovascular health event.
