In a 2010 episode of the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, special guest and celebrity medium Allison DuBois cooed about cast member Kyle Richards, “I can tell you when she’s going to die and what’s going to happen to her family.”
Most of us don’t possess these inter-realm powers, but an app called Deadline does. The creepy new app uses Apple’s Healthkit to help determine your approximate “expiration.” Or, to put it more bluntly, when you’re going to croak.
Deadline’s app store description reads as follows: “Deadline uses statistical information to attempt to determine your date of expiration, but no app can really accurately determine when you will die, so consider this a way to motivate yourself to be healthier, and consult a physician as necessary.”
Using Healthkit and a short survey, Deadline provides users with an estimate of the day and time at which they’ll pass on. You can, of course, change this date by making healthy lifestyle choices. Regardless of your health, the app comes with a ticker, so you can watch yourself slowly inch toward death.
So really this is a fitness app disguised as a death app and stamped with a dead bird mascot. AARP commercials and the adult diapers aisle at the drugstore remind us of our own mortality, but Deadline serves as a free and easy way to be constantly aware of it, since it sits on your phone’s lock screen.
There are other apps and gadgets in this vein. A wearable called Tikker literally counts down the seconds until you’re set to die. There’s also an app called Odds of Death, which predicts how likely it is that you’ll die in certain ways.
The last Deadline review in the app store says it all:
Crazy accurate. I died on the exact same day as predicted.
H/T Gizmodo | Photo via swimparallel/Flickr (CC By 2.0)
