Nov. 6 Media Briefing at GSA 2026 in National Harbor: GSA Report Explores Wearables Data as Longevity Indicators
Media Briefing: Unit of Health: The Currency of Longevity
Date: Friday, November 6, 2026
Time: 12 to 1:15 p.m. ET
Location: Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center, Magnolia 2
Registration: GSA 2026 Annual Scientific Meeting media registration is required to attend this event.
Wearable devices and health apps are making it increasingly possible to translate daily choices into estimates of future health. A new GSA-authored report, “Unit of Health: The Currency of Longevity,” illustrates how a person’s longevity can be explored using daily habits as recorded by wearables and in electronic health records. The proposed “Unit of Health,” or Unit•H, imagines one added day of healthy life as a practical benchmark.
The concept arrives as consumer technology companies, health systems, and longevity-focused businesses market increasingly sophisticated tools — from smartwatches and continuous glucose monitors to biological-age tests and full-body imaging. Financial planning has a readily understood unit — the dollar — while health planning has no equivalent measure of value or progress. Unit•H is intended to fill part of that gap by defining health in terms of healthy life expectancy: years lived with function and without serious illness or disability.
Yet health differs fundamentally from wealth because it is probabilistic, shaped by forces outside individual control, and difficult to reduce to a single number. And health metrics can have powerful emotional effects, including “data anxiety,” in which people fixate on day-to-day variation in sleep, activity, or other measurements that can worsen the symptoms they are trying to manage.
During this briefing, experts in financial services, technology, medicine and longevity will define the concept of a Unit of Health, explore the multitude of technologies that track contributing factors to one’s longevity, and discuss the opportunities and pitfalls of developing a precise personal forecast for one’s future.
Presenters:
- Surya Kolluri, MBA, TIAA Institute (Moderator)
- Pinchas Cohen, MD, Leonard Davis School of Gerontology, University of Southern California
- Diane Ty, MA, MBA, Future of Aging, Milken Institute
Lunch will be served. This briefing is being organized and conducted by the Gerontological Society of America. Support for the report and briefing is provided by the TIAA Institute.
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The Gerontological Society of America (GSA), founded in 1945, is the oldest and largest interdisciplinary organization focused on aging. It serves more than 6,000 members in over 50 countries. GSA’s vision, meaningful lives as we age, is supported by its mission to foster excellence, innovation, and collaboration to advance aging research, education, practice, and policy. GSA is home to the National Academy on an Aging Society (a nonpartisan public policy institute) and the National Center to Reframe Aging.