The human body has two different ages: a Chronological Age (CA) and a Biological Age (BA). Chronological Age refers to the actual time a human has been alive, while Biological Age refers to how old that human seems. The real BA is different to the CA because it includes the speed at which each person is aging and, for this reason, it is dramatically difficult to estimate. At the same time, the knowledge of an accurate BA index for each individual is of vital importance because it can be used to identify causes of aging and evaluate rejuvenation therapies and, thus, it impacts on different spheres of the society, including, among others, health, economics, political and welfare strategies and decisions.
The MIR-AGE project has the ambitious and challenging goal to propose, and experimentally validate, an innovative tool for accurately estimating and predicting the BA of each individual. This research study is of primary interest and directly impacts one of the societal challenges and priorities of the EU Framework Programme for Research and Innovation, H2020, namely the “Health, demographic change and wellbeing”. In addition, different public and private organizations have expressed their interest on the MIR-AGE project activities, such as AitAAL (Italian Association for AAL), INNOVAAL, FIMMG (Federazione Italiana Medici di Medicina Generale Regione Marche), DAN (Divers Alert Network Europe).
The project aims to develop an innovative tool to compute the biological age of each person. The breakthrough innovation of the proposed project consists to determine the biological age index of each person via the integration of hereditary factors, biological information based on a set of age-dependent variables-biomarkers, and his/her lifestyle information, such as eating and sleeping habits, domestic and sport activities, job and others.
In order to reach this ambitious goal, different biological and lifestyle factors will be defined in the project to be used to estimate an accurate BA. The study will be conducted on a healthy reference population, extracting the identified biological markers from the General Practitioner (GP) Data Set, named Cloud NETMEDICA. About the lifestyle monitoring, a comprehensive technological infrastructure will be designed, developed and installed in the living environments of selected subjects. The lifestyle information of each individual will be completed by ad hoc questionnaires and by his/her daily life diary. An innovative algorithmic tool to estimate the BA of each individual will be developed and experimentally validated on the selected healthy reference population, inside of Marche region, ranging from 20 to over 100 chronological years. A cloud based database (namely, DBaaS - DataBase as a Service) and a web platform will be developed to show analysis and results of the project. The potential impact of the developed UnivPM-BA index will be studied by healthy, economic, political and social point of view.
The ambitious goal of the project will be reached adopting a multidisciplinary approach, involving several expertise of different research fields. The involved partners are expert group from the Economics, Medicine and Engineering Faculty who have long research experiences on methodologies and technologies for active aging, proven by several international publications, and their enrollment in international and international projects, such as the Smart Living Technologies’ Cluster (SHELL Project), Smart Cities and Communities and Social Innovation (Health @ Home Project), and others.