HACKER Q&A
📣 Livaton

Feedback on my life expectancy tracking startup


I am creating a web app where you input your details/habits/activity (date of birth, gender, exercise, drink/smoke, diet, etc) to track your life expectancy and see how it increases or decreases as you change your lifestyle. Would you consider subscribing to something like this and what are your thoughts?


  👤 JohnFen Accepted Answer ✓
I wouldn't, simply because I'm not actually interested in individualized estimates of life expectancy. As far as I'm aware, there is no way to do this while maintaining a usefully low margin of error.

I'd be more interested in a general estimate of how healthy my lifestyle is (which is what I think people are generally, and mistakenly, using "life expectancy" as a proxy for.)

That said, any such application like this comes with pretty hardcore privacy implications. I wouldn't be comfortable giving that level of detail about my life habits to any unknown entity for any reason. An application that runs and processes everything locally and never communicates with an external server would be interesting, though!


👤 torunar
Short answer: no, I would never subscribe to something like this.

Long answer: I would never trust my health or lifestyle data to a non-government organisation, and I would never pay for unreliable information based on guestimations.