LifeQ, a company that uses watch brands to gather personalized, clinical-grade data, announced it can detect as many as 40 sleep and cardiovascular disorders with smartwatches and other wearable devices, with an anticipated 100 detectable diseases and disorders within the next two years.

LifeQ co-founders Laurence Olivier, CEO, and Franco du Preez, PhD, chief science officer, made the recent announcement.

“Wearable devices are the future of personalized medicine, providing continuous health monitoring and enabling the prevention of common diseases and disorders,” says Olivier. “There is an urgent need for accessible, clinical-grade insights on a broad scale for both healthy and sick humans, from young to old, preventative and curative, chronic and acute, whether before, during, or post-treatment. This coverage is now achievable—not with complex medical instruments, but with simple everyday wearables.”

Smartwatches and other wearables allow ongoing measurement of an additional layer of critical biometrics beyond the commonly available heart rate, skin temperature, and blood pressure, to sleep activity, respiratory rate, and daily fitness, which make clinical-grade health screening and monitoring possible.

With this information, smartwatches and other wearables are suited to monitor long-term health conditions to assist physicians and healthcare professionals ahead of diagnostics and during treatment, as well as consumers seeking to improve their health and wellness, according to the company.

“LifeQ’s mission is to help people age well,” says Preez. “By delaying biological aging, reducing the probability of chronic disease, screening for the early onset of disease, as well as maximizing human performance, harnessing more energy, and gaining a deeper understanding of one’s own unique body and health—lives may be transformed for the better.”

LifeQ is integrated with top global brands, including Fossil, TAG Heuer, Montblanc, Suunto, and Xiaomi, and three companies in the global Fortune 50, comprising approximately 50% of all wearables manufacturers in the world.

“LifeQ complements and supports physicians and healthcare providers in their important diagnostic work, capturing biometrics 24/7, 365 days a year, flagging issues, and facilitating diagnosis and treatment,” says Armin Deffur, PhD, chief medical officer.

LifeQ-enabled devices will help busy clinicians to detect important medical conditions, enable data-driven disease classification as well as facilitate disease prevention.

Acute disease, which represents a sudden and severe health problem, can affect every person at any age and may often go unnoticed until the patient has already become ill. LifeQ’s technology has flagged acute disease in a broad range of participants over the past several years, including during the COVID-19 crisis, by flagging and enabling treatment and preventing spread, often in patients that did not exhibit symptoms, the company asays.

Screening for and flagging disease using wearables is possible through LifeQ’s unique combination of photoplethysmography (PPG) and computational systems biology approach. Predictive models that are contextualized with respect to existing scientific knowledge and causal relationships enable the flagging of diseases and disorders that may otherwise be impossible to recognize until they have already progressed.