13 hours ago
Preventative AI Is Poised To Transform Health Insurance
Senior woman using health technology
Backed by more than $250 million of venture capital from Creandum, Target Global, OurCrowd, Dai-ichi Life, and others, London-based startup YuLife is defining a new category—Preventative AI—at the intersection of insurance, AI, and wellness.
Preventative AI transforms health insurance from static underwriting to adaptive, biometric-driven risk intelligence. Integrating wearable data, causal AI, and reinforcement learning, it enables proactive health interventions at scale.
YuLife launched its proprietary, real-time Preventative AI platform today, replacing traditional risk assessment tools that rely on legacy datasets and backwards-looking models with a multi-layered, novel approach. It combines biometric streaming, causal modelling and federated learning, on top of which sits its patented, adaptive health questionnaire and predictive analytics engine. YuLife describes it as an 'adaptive risk engine' that continuously learns, engages, and optimizes, delivering value to users and underwriters in real-time.
The health signals data for YuLife's AI comes from wearables and IoT devices via secure, low-latency pipelines. The data is normalized, de-duplicated and time-aligned in real time, ensuring that every heart-rate spike or sleep disturbance immediately informs the AI risk models. Analyzing the data, YuLife's Preventive AI platform dynamically tests hypotheses, uncovering the behaviors that drive beneficial outcomes. For example, does increasing midday steps result in a reduction of late-night restlessness? Individual records are not centralized to ensure privacy protection and only anonymized summaries are shared back from users' devices.
A complimentary data source feeding the AI models is a dynamic, continuously customized survey of more than 300 questions about 23 wellbeing topics such as diet, mindful eating, and social connections. The design of the survey is based on the knowledge gained by the UK Biobank research, a large-scale, long-term health study. It has collected and continues to track in-depth genetic, lifestyle, and health data from over 500,000 participants aged 40–69, and is widely regarded as a gold standard for population health research.
YuLife's analysis of the data allows it to identify emerging health risks in real time and deliver timely, personalized nudges (e.g., 'Try a 5-minute breathing exercise now') or unlock targeted rewards. It also uses game mechanics to drive frequent engagement, ensuring the AI platform learns from each interaction. Users are rewarded with YuCoin, driving long-term participation and measurable lifestyle improvements.
The Preventative AI platform offers underwriters causal insights, indicating what will happen and why, while maintaining compliance with emerging AI governance frameworks. It is modular and cloud-native, enabling seamless integration with enterprise benefits platforms, insurance systems, and healthcare networks. YuLife has validated its AI through academic partnerships, and early deployment data shows significant reductions in risk indicators and claims.
AI and wearable technology are revolutionizing health and wellness by enabling personalized, data-driven care. From early disease detection to real-time health monitoring, these innovations are helping individuals take control of their health while also supporting healthcare providers in delivering better outcomes.
In its most recent survey of the $2 trillion global wellness market, McKinsey found that younger generations are increasingly prioritizing wellness. Nearly 30% of Gen Zers (people born between 1997 and 2012) and millennials (born between 1981 and 1996) in the United States report prioritizing wellness 'a lot more' compared with one year ago, versus up to 23% of older generations. 'Older consumers,' says McKinsey, 'still represent a meaningful opportunity for wellness players, especially in advanced markets with ageing populations.'
YuLife highlights a few data points to explain the urgent need to redefine health insurance: 68% of consumers do not trust their insurer, and almost no engagement or value is delivered to consumers daily. At the same time, approximately 80% of chronic disease and premature death could be prevented by not smoking, being physically active, and adhering to a healthful dietary pattern. The estimated cost of chronic disease is expected to reach $47 trillion worldwide by 2030. Enlisting AI to proactively help consumers adjust their lifestyle habits and improve their health could be an essential step in reducing this global burden.
