Most of the audience at this year’s Smart Ageing Conference in Blox, Copenhagen, wanted to know if they get sick later in life – but primarily, if they can do something about it. The majority also wanted to know when they die. Smart Ageing 2021 in Blox arranged by the Challenge Platform attracted over 170 participants.

Who wants to know when they’ll die?

And overwhelming big amount of green pieces of paper were lifted up. Most of them probably have individual reasons, but at least some of them told us, they want to know in order to spend their savings in time.

A little fewer green papers and more red papers came up on the question: If a gene test can show that you have a high risk of getting cancer, do you want to know? (photo)

Smart Aldring 2021 was about what data can tell us about our ageing. We still are at the beginning of the data age, and we are starting to understand, what data can do for us and our health.

Professor Laust Hvas Mortensen told us what data from Statistics Denmark tell us what we are predisposed for. Professor Zorana Andersen gave us an update on what the environment around us means for our healthy ageing. See the there talks here. (only in Danish)

We heard the tv-doctor and author Charlotte Bøving, who lives with an ‘expiry date’, as she herself calls it; she has a cancer diagnosis. And we heard about three ways of dealing with you data:

• Data For Good Foundation, a personal data store, where you can upload you own data, enrich them with other data, and donate you data for science or other purposes.
• Sundhed.dk, where you can see your own health data, including test result from a Corona test, your appointments in the health system, and a lot of other things.
• MiniQ – a Swedish tool (also available in Spanish) helping patients, who take five different drugs or more, avoid drug conflicts and get info about the drugs.

16 participants from the audience got into the video booth in the snack break to answer the question: What do you want to know – and not know – about your risk of getting sick later in life?

You can see all the 16 videos, a highlight video from the conference and Zorana Anders and Laust Mortensen here on the conference landing page. It is, unfortunately, only in Danish. Thanks to our sponsor, Novo Nordisk Fonden.