Your birthday is a fact. Your biological age is an estimate, and the honest way to talk about it starts there.
The idea
Two people born the same year can be aging at very different rates, and the difference shows up in things that can be measured: how the blood looks, how fit the heart and lungs are, how well you sleep, how much muscle you carry, how you recover. Put enough of those together and you can estimate an age that describes the body rather than the calendar. Done carefully, that estimate predicts health outcomes better than the birthday does, which is the only reason it is worth computing.
Wave Age is our version of that number.
What goes into it
The strongest inputs are bloodwork. A handful of routine markers, the kind on a standard panel, carry most of the signal: glucose and the longer-term glucose measure, a marker of inflammation, kidney and liver function, a few blood counts. The best-validated published models are built on exactly these, and Wave’s estimate starts from one of them when your labs are on file.
Around that sits lifestyle: estimated aerobic fitness, resting heart rate, heart-rate variability, sleep regularity, activity and strength work, read from your wearable, your scans and your logs. These move faster than labs do, and they are what lets the number respond to a good month rather than waiting a year for the next blood draw.
Without labs, Wave still estimates from the lifestyle inputs, and it says so. The estimate is wider. It narrows when the bloodwork arrives.
What it is not
It is not a diagnosis, and it is not a prediction about you personally. It is a population model applied to your numbers, which is a useful thing and a limited one. A Wave Age of 44 for a 49-year-old does not mean you have five years in the bank. It means your measurable inputs look more like a typical 44-year-old’s than a typical 49-year-old’s, today.
It is also not precise to the decimal. The app shows one because a trend needs resolution, not because the third digit means anything. What is worth watching is the direction over months.
Moving it
This is where the number earns its place, because the inputs are exactly the things you can change. Easy aerobic work raises estimated fitness. Strength work and protein hold muscle. A regular sleep schedule steadies the recovery markers. Less alcohol and more fiber move the labs in the right direction over a year. None of it is exotic, and all of it shows up in the estimate before it shows up in a mirror.
Wave lets you set a target Wave Age and a date, and reads every week against it: what moved, what did not, and the one thing most worth doing next.
Wave is for general wellness. A Wave Age is an estimate for your own interest, not a medical assessment, and nothing about it replaces your doctor’s reading of your labs.
