Rosita Longevity wants to teach seniors how to live long, healthy lives

It’s about supporting seniors to live well, up to a ‘good innings’ like 95, while (hopefully) retaining their independence and vitality through the application of technology that creates a structured and engaging lifestyle routine which works to combat age-related conditions such as frailty and social isolation.The startup is coming out of stealth today to disclose a first tranche of pre-seed funding and chat to TechCrunch about its dream of supporting seniors to live a more active, fulfilling and independent life.The €450k pre-seed round, which is led by JME.vc with participation from Kfund, Seedcamp and NextVentures, will be used for research and continued development of its Rosita Longevity digital coach. Rosita’s co-founders are husband and wife team, Juan Cartagena (CEO) and Clara Fernández (CCO), along with CTO David Gil. Their premise is that what humans really need, as they age, is guidance and motivation to stay as active as they can, for as long as they can — and that a digital platform is the best way to make personalized, ‘healthy habit’ forming therapy for seniors widely accessible.“We believe that we have to be a habit engine,” says Cartagena, offering “health longevity” as another descriptor for the scope of what they’re aiming to achieve.Fernández is drawing directly on her years of experience as CEO of Balneario de Cofrentes, a family business in Valencia, which she describes as a “longevity school” or camp for seniors — and which the website suggests is a combination of spa/hotel, physical therapy/rehabilitation and education center. And we are trying to go beyond that — it’s just the starting point [for reducing frailty] and the issues related to that, including the final ‘disease’ which would be dependence.”Since the premise underlying the Rosita app hinges on the proven health benefits of regular, moderate exercise as a means of combating a range of age-related conditions — such as muscle mass loss and reduced bone density leading to frailty (which in turn can lead to a fall, a broken hip, and a senior who’s suddenly dependent on personal care) — or, beyond that, as a general bolster for mental and brain health — they are squatting on established (rather than moonshotty) science.Although they do still need to demonstrate that digitally delivered, personalized programs of lifestyle coaching — featuring familiar but still sometimes clunky technologies like AI and chatbots — can actually help reverse frailty (in the first instance) for seniors participating remotely, with no human physiotherapists on hand to help.Screenshots of the digital coaching app (Image credit: Hearts Radiant/Rosita Longevity)Screenshots of the digital coaching app (Image credit: Hearts Radiant/Rosita Longevity)Hence some of the funding will go on researching how their bricks-and-mortar ‘longevity school’ program translates to a digital platform. This pre-seed round is basically to take that uncertainty, put that in front of a few thousand [app] users, take that research… and see if in the next 12 months we improve [their frailty level].”The actual Balneario is closed at the moment, in this health-stricken year of the novel coronavirus, but the plan is to reopen in March 2021 — and then introduce the annual intake to Rosita — garnering ongoing feedback on whether or not it’s steering them toward health-supporting habits.“It’s all about understanding the customer so well and that’s where the competitive advantage of this company really comes from,” argues Cartagena. “We’re more about discovering what are the indicators and the tools to make sure that the senior population… understand what it happening to their body, what is going to happen over the next ten years and start to slowly develop those habits so that they can minimize, reduce the evolution, the natural ageing process.”Cartagena notes they are also working with researchers on developing sensor hardware that could go alongside the app to enhance their ability to predict frailty — suggesting it will allow them to define a wider/more nuanced range of user categories (the first version of the app has three categories but he says they want to be able to offer nine).Smartphone and sensor hardware combined with AI technology has, for some years now, been enabling a new generation of guided physical therapy apps that seek to offer an alternative to pharmaceutical-based management for chronic pain — such as Kaia Health and Hinge Health, to name two.