Three things happen when you run a simulation.
We describe your best mate. You tell us their breed, age, weight, and the shape of their daily life. We turn that into a statistical portrait.
We compare them to their peers. Your dog or cat sits alongside a cohort of similar Australian animals. Similar breed, similar age band, similar climate, similar lifestyle.
We model the trajectory. We run thousands of possible futures and report the patterns. The output is a profile, not a prediction of a specific date.
What Vivect uses, and what it does not.
Uses
What you tell us about your dog or cat, any AU vet blood panel you choose to upload, optional stool or wearable data if you connect it, and a peer cohort blended from similar Australian animals.
Does not use
Your location beyond postcode, your name beyond what you give us, any record that could identify your vet, or any data sold on from a third party.
Methodology.
Vivect combines an actuarial mortality model that has been refined since 1825 with a modern statistical simulation technique, layered over a peer cohort of Australian dogs and cats. The result is a trajectory, not a verdict.
The actuarial backbone.
In 1825 a British actuary named Benjamin Gompertz read a paper to the Royal Society describing how the risk of death rises roughly exponentially with age. Two centuries of life-insurance and demography work have refined and stress-tested that observation. Vivect uses a modern form of the same mathematics, adapted to the lifespans of dogs and cats.
The simulation technique.
On top of the mortality curve, Vivect runs a Monte Carlo simulation. That is a standard statistical method for producing a range of plausible outcomes instead of a single number. The range is the answer. A single number would mislead.
The peer cohort.
Your dog or cat is compared against a cohort of Australian dogs or cats of similar breed, age, and lifestyle. The blend weights your animal's own profile more heavily than the cohort, but lets the cohort fill in what your data cannot tell us.
What the biological age indicator means.
Biological age is not your dog's or cat's true age, and it is not a diagnosis. It is an indicator of how their modelled profile compares to the cohort average. A higher number is a prompt to look more carefully, not a verdict.
Sources we lean on.
Gompertz, B. (1825). On the nature of the function expressive of the law of human mortality, and on a new mode of determining the value of life contingencies. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London.
Kirkwood, T.B.L. (2015). Deciphering death: a commentary on Gompertz (1825). Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2014.0379.
The broader two centuries of actuarial and biodemographic work that has refined the model since Gompertz.