What is the impact of wearable technologies on life expectancy?
Wearable technologies are becoming increasingly important in our daily lives as well as in medicine, potentially leading to medical breakthroughs such as live health monitoring and the individualization of treatments. While this digitalization of treatments and patient follow-up could transform the entire healthcare sector, it also raises some issues for life insurers: What are the consequences from the daily or occasional use of these objects in terms of mortality? How can these effects be integrated into mortality projections? And how can incentives be incorporated into life and health products? This white paper aims to study, through the existing literature, the extent to which the different types of wearable technologies can enhance health and life expectancy, whether through the better health management they enable or the amount of data they provide to compute more accurate predictions for health and lifespan. Finally, this white paper analyzes the treatment of wearables in insurance contracts.