Death-Predicting Technology

There is a new technology being introduced and it is slowly gaining popularity because it involves age, beauty and death.

This technology can estimate anyone's age from their face and how long that person have to live. All they need to do is upload a decent size photo according to the requirements (face forward, no smiles, well lit and hair pulled back), answer a few simple questions and voila! It will give them an estimate of age and how long they have left to live.

FaceMyAge.com analyzes a face based on the uploaded picture and takes into account the answers on their lifestyle choices (smoking habits, drug habits, sun exposure, and marital status) to estimate age and predict lifespans. The program looks for sagging muscles and fat paddings on a face as well as skin discolorations and wrinkles by the eyes to estimate your current age (hence the ‘no smiles’ requirement).

This technology is realized by two teams: an Identity Sciences Team from University of North Carolina Wilmington (UNCW), and a Demographic/Actuarial Sciences Team from the University of Chicago.

Dr. Jay Olshansky, a Professor at the University of Illinois and Research Associate at the University of Chicago initiated the project to determine the upper limits to human longevity as well as to find out the relations between health and aging. Using this website, he also means to gather a database of individuals from different populations groups in pursuit of increasing people’s lifespans.

According to Dr Olshansky, the idea came to him over dinner with someone who worked for an insurance company. The friend lamented that it was difficult to access a person’s survival prospects in the limited time given, prompting Dr. Olshansky to find an alternative, scientific way of utilizing his expertise.

Using a complicated algorithm and a vast database of faces, the program assesses the age of different parts of the face and estimates the current age of the person based on the mean. The only issue is, of course, the quality of the photo. Grainy and low resolution pictures will make people look older and compromise the ability of the program.