PORTO CERVO — Filippo Nigro, founder and CEO of YOU(th), presented his smartphone health check at the annual Longevity Fest Costa Smeralda in Sardinia in October at an event organised by the Consorzio Costa Smeralda, part of the Territori di Eccellenza network. His Berlin company, Youth Health Tech, raised $4.5 million in February 2026.

“The apps that use a video of your face are getting reasonably good at measuring heart rate, but blood pressure and blood markers are going to be much harder,” said Dr Frank Agullo, a board-certified plastic surgeon who teaches at Texas Tech.

“But the biggest risk isn’t that these apps might get something wrong; it’s that people may trust the results too much,” said Eugene Formaniuk, founder of Carebits, a Polish remote fetal monitoring company.

Italy Now spoke to Nigro about longevity, body tracking tech, and what the future holds.

Q. What does YOU(th) do?

“We do digital biomarkers,” Nigro said. “Put simply, it is a health checkup through your smartphone.”

A face video, voice recordings, skin photos, and typing patterns are processed by machine learning models, which he describes as validated, into readings such as blood pressure and heart rate.

Q. How accurate is it?

“For blood markers such as cholesterol, accuracy is lower and it is not diagnostic,” Nigro said. “But it is good enough to tell you whether you are in the diabetic, prediabetic, or nondiabetic zone.”

Q. What makes it different?

“There are two points, accessibility and completeness,” he said. “In 30 seconds or two minutes, I give you information on 10 body systems.”

Q. What happens to the face video?

“It is processed on the device, it is not saved, it is deleted immediately,” Nigro said. “We keep only the result, such as your blood pressure.”

Q. How did you get to Berlin?

“I grew up in Turin until I was 18, then studied in Milan, Los Angeles, and Beijing,” Nigro said. “After investment banking in Dubai, I moved to Berlin and joined a machine learning startup.”

Q. Why longevity?

“I was obsessed with health tracking, spending about 300 euros a month on DNA tests, blood tests, and glucose monitors,” he said. “Then I read research showing these markers could be detected from a phone.”

Q. What is wrong with prevention today?

“A preventive visit can take more than three weeks,” Nigro said. “The new longevity clinics are very sexy, but they cost 500, 1,000, or 2,000 euros for a measurement.”

Q. Who uses it?

“Most of our users are between 45 and 60,” he said. “Younger users, 25 to 35, are biohackers and data nerds who want data.”

Q. What have you learned?

“In startups you always want to go fast,” Nigro said. “In health, going too fast can damage people’s trust.”

Q. Do people act on the results?

“Everyone wants an action plan, but nobody follows it,” he said. “Nobody wants to make the effort.”

Q. What is your own rule for longevity?

“Be happy with what you do,” he said. “Then the basics, sleep, eat well, and exercise.”

Nigro’s next bet is that prevention should need no effort at all. He wants the phone to monitor passively while people message and work, raising an alert only when something looks wrong. Whether users will trust a phone that watches that closely remains an open question.