Living a fit and healthy lifestyle looks set to have its financial benefits, thanks to a Technology and Human Resources for Industry Programme research project being conducted at the University of Cape Town Medical Research Centre’s unit for exercise science and sports medicine.
Under the leadership of Professor Tim Noakes, the project has developed a system of monitoring individual health and fitness, which will allow health and life insurance companies in South Africa to tailor insurance premiums that are a true reflection of the well-being of the individual.
‘Physical activity has a well-established link with reducing the risks of what is known as all-cause mortality,” says Noakes.
Noakes explains that by assessing a person’s state of health and fitness, the project can also assess his or her risk to insurers by examining such factors as age, gender, body-mass index and other lifestyle influences such as smoking and alcohol use.
This information is assimilated together with statistics of the insured population and other conditions that affect the level of risk in a person’s lifestyle. The resulting information should give insurance companies the ability to offer discounted rates to people with a healthier and more active lifestyle.
Noakes’s team has developed a system of measuring these factors. Christened Body iQ, the system has been commercially introduced by the project’s industry partner, Winning Wellness, which is administering the tests in biokinetic centres and gymnasiums across South Africa.
Last year more than 30 000 people underwent Body iQ tests, resulting in possibly the best and most comprehensive medical database in the world today.
The Body iQ test includes a revolutionary exercise aimed at measuring the relationship between exercise and the recovery heart rate.
Heart rate is crucial to assessment data, as a person’s ability to recover a normal heart rate after strenuous exercise is a key indicator of his or her overall fitness and state of health.
However, the use of heart rate data has been prone to abuse in the past, with fraudulent data submitted to medical schemes and insurers. As a result, the project has had to develop a heart rate response ‘fingerprint”, which is used to identify individual exercisers and is as unique to each individual as their actual fingerprints, making it much more difficult to manipulate.
Noakes has discovered that during rest, the time, or R-R interval, between heart beats varies and is influenced by a number of factors.
Exercise alters the R-R interval, making it less variable and, as the intensity of the exercise increases, there comes an inevitable point at which the variability is reduced to zero.
‘If we can show that each individual has his or her own ‘zero-point’ that is unique to them and is consistent, the R-R index can be used as a ‘fingerprint’ marker that will ensure the integrity of exercise data,” explains Noakes.
He is working on the project with three postgraduate students.
The project has helped more than 70 physical education graduates to establish biokinetic practices to promote Body iQ testing and other areas of sports advancement.