Death Clock App Not Ready for Prime Time, Says Ethicist
Hi. I'm Art Caplan. I'm at NYU's Division of Medical Ethics at our medical school.
I came across a really interesting app called the Death Clock. It is exactly what it sounds like. It basically is an app where you feed in all your health information, personal information, social information — any fact about you — and it promises to tell you your death date.It basically is a forecaster of when you're going to die. You might say, some people might have an interest in that. What's the issue?
Well, I think there are many issues. Should a patient come and ask you about this, I think you'd be wise to be ready to answer in case this app or others like it that are coming take off.The first problem is, can we accurately predict your death date, even given a whole array of personal information? I still don't think so.
Having worked now for a while on geroscience, meaning what factors cause senescence — not diseases in old age, like Alzheimer's disease or Lewy body dementia, but just aging — we don't really understand why some people age at different rates.
There's a disease called progeria where a 10-year-old can go through aging and end up looking like a 90-year-old at the age of 11. Then, there are clearly differences in the rates at which people age from midlife to old age. We don't understand them well, but we're learning. I think an app that says it can tell you your death date is not accurate.
Some people aren't going to want to know their death date without getting counseling. If someone asks if they should buy the app, I think either that company or you, as the doctor, had better be prepared to counsel them about what it would mean if it predicted an early death or a death that's coming soon.
Aside from fear and worry, what plans should they make?Should they fill out advanced directives? Should they not retire to Arizona sooner? They're going to want information and counseling, and somebody has to provide it to them, and I don't see this company doing that yet. People need to at least try to cope with bad news.
Another reason the company says the app is interesting is it'll push you to make lifestyle changes that will extend your death date.Indeed, they offer — I think it was for $50 a year, if I remember right — a program to counsel you, claiming to be targeted to your particular situation, so that you can live longer. I doubt that is necessary either.
We all know how to counsel patients in terms of wanting to live longer.It's simple steps. I don't mean simple to do, but I mean five or six rules that hold up: lose weight, more exercise, moderate drinking, wear your seatbelt, don't use recreational drugs in excess. We know what the tricks are if you want to add lifespan. I don't think you need to sign up for anybody's program yet.
Probably the biggest worry I have is, who's going to get all this information? I don't trust this company not to resell. I don't trust this company to protect individual identity. Even if they tried, with hackers and accidents, having this private company control identifiable information — boy, I think that's a much bigger risk than any benefit you might get from having the death clock.
Overall, I'm still not ready. I did take a peek at my own prediction. I've got some time left, which is good to know, but that was just curiosity so that I could talk to you about it. In general, I don't think this is ready for prime time. I do think the downsides still outweigh the benefits, so I would be pretty cautious before I set the death clock with a patient.
I'm Art Caplan, at the Division of Medical Ethics at NYU Langone. Thanks for watching.
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