dacadoo updates, Making the right decisions
July 20, 2015
Why is the Health Score a valuable indicator to track over time?
In the past few years we have seen a “consumerization” of medical devices, as there has been an explosion of health and fitness-related wearable devices and applications in the market. Most major consumer electronics manufacturers have launched step counters, digital weighing scales, blood pressure monitors, activity bands and, more recently, smart watches, moving the wearables market to an early mass market. It has never been easier for people to get easy access to a variety of health and fitness-related data, but this is also a problem, as no one can handle a multitude of data and often doesn’t know how to put the data points into a larger context.
If health and wellbeing remain intangible, it is difficult to work with them. Conceptually, if you can measure it, you can work with it. So you need something that retrieves the intelligence out of all these data points and provides a visual and easy to understand status of where an individual stands in his/her current health and wellbeing.
That is exactly what the dacadoo Health Score does, as it simplifies the health status of individuals into just one number, so that it can be universally understood. Just like a FICO score (or another credit score) determines the credit worthiness based on the financial assets and activities of a person, the dacadoo Health Score measures the overall health and well-being of a person, based on body values, emotional well-being and lifestyle (exercise, nutrition, stress and sleep). When tracked over time, it offers a good indicator of how health and well-being is evolving. The dacadoo Health Score is a number from 1 (low) to 1000 (high) and it moves up or down in real-time, depending on how your body, emotional wellbeing or lifestyle data change. Think of it as your own personal stock quote of your health and wellbeing in real-time, similar to a stock quote on a stock exchange.
dacadoo decided to go for a score and not an age-related measure (such as bio-age, real-age, etc.) for two very important reasons: we wanted an indicator, where old people could compare themselves to young people, and also men could compare themselves to women. To do so, we went through a mathematical process called equalization for age and sex, so that the score could be used as a universal measure of health ranking.
Please note that it is not a medical diagnostic tool and therefore does not substitute the diagnosis of a medical professional.
