Researchers say smartphones could be used to predict someone's death. 

The experts say the data that a smartphone can collect could be used to construct population-level models of our health and risk of dying early. 

A research team has measured the activity of 100,000 people in the UK over a week, and say that only six minutes per day of steady walking was needed to calculate a person's five-year likelihood of dying. 

They say the motion sensors can accurately measure our gait speed and walking pace, which we can scale up to gather better national health data.

“Our results show passive measures with motion sensors can achieve similar accuracy to active measures of gait speed and walk pace,” the authors say. 

“Our scalable methods offer a feasible pathway towards national screening for health risk.”

The full study is accessible here.