Product1 publisher2 min readPublished
Apple's Health Age joins four rival scores that already disagree about one 38-year-old
Apple will add a Health Age number later this year to a category where Whoop, Oura, Withings and Garmin each compute their own. Verge reviewer Victoria Song has collected age scores from six products, and they do not agree.
The Product Desk · Product desk
What happened
- Apple said at last week's Apple Watch announcement that a longevity feature called Health Age will arrive later this year, alongside a new readiness metric and a redesigned Health app.
- Whoop, Oura, Withings and Garmin already ship their own versions under four different names, among them Whoop age and a fitness age score.
- At CES, a longevity mirror estimated Verge reviewer Victoria Song's physiological age and facial skin age by measuring the blood flow in her face from a 30-second selfie.
- Song, who is 38, has been handed whole-body age estimates by four products in the same stretch, and the highest and lowest of them are seven years apart.
- Apple's vice president of health, Sumbul Desai, says in an Instagram Reel that Health Age could be something you brag about to your friends, according to Song.
Compiled by The Product DeskSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- constraint A user moving from Whoop to an Apple Watch cannot carry the number across, and support inherits a jump in body age that nobody can reconcile because the two scores are not measuring the same construct.
- decision Anyone shipping a composite age has to decide now what the product says when the number goes the wrong way, because the older number is the one Song says people keep quiet about.
- exposure Rolling sleep, workouts and heart data into one age invites the user to treat it as a check-up, and Song's caution is that the wearable version often misses the rest.
- precedent With Apple adding one, a composite age becomes an expected line item on any consumer health platform, and the brag framing arrives with it by default.
One of the four whole-body numbers came from a bed. Song's $5,000 smart mattress topper told her she is "trending older" this week, at 38.7 years [8]. The other three came from Whoop at 42, from Garmin's fitness age at 36.5, and from a longevity mirror at CES at 35 [5][6][7]. Highest minus lowest is seven years, for one person who is 38 [17][4].
Withings disagrees with itself. Its scale puts her vascular age a year above her chronological age and her heart four years below it [9], which is 39 and 34 side by side in one product, a five-year gap [18]. Oura's cardiovascular age has moved across a 5.5-year band on the same heart in two years, from seven years younger to 1.5 years younger, and it currently sits at two years younger [10][19].
Whoop describes its weighting. The age score leans heavily on strength training, and Song, who was doing more cardio than heavy lifting, could have moved the number by lifting more [11]. That is what made it useful to her: she could name the input and the action. Her column does not say how the other vendors derive or validate their scores [21]. She wrote that depending on how a company defines the score, the result can identify areas where you can improve [20]. On Apple she is holding fire: "Frankly, I won't rule on Apple's version of the feature until I can test it for myself," she wrote [12].
Teams assume users treat a rolled-up age as a target and train against it. Song reports otherwise: a younger number becomes something to bandy about; an older one goes unmentioned and feels shameful, even though it is not [13]. Bryan Johnson, who is 49, posted a chart on X titled "Is Bryan Johnson More 18 or 49?" [15].
Two questions sort these features for anyone building or buying one: whether the user can name the input that moved the number, and whether the vendor publishes the weighting. Both yes, and the score is a to-do list. Weighting published with no single input to act on, and it is a benchmark. Actionable but opaque, which is where Whoop sat until Song worked out the strength-training bias by testing it, and the user learns the rule only by experiment [11]. Neither, and the only things left to do with the number are post it or hide it. Song's own caution is that a wearable-determined age often does not capture the whole picture [16].
What to watch
- Whether Apple publishes the inputs and weights behind Health Age when it ships, or only the number itself.
- Whether Withings reconciles heart age and vascular age when the two contradict each other in the same app.
- Whether any of these vendors publishes a validation study for its age score against clinical measures.