Living longer, living better?

It’s equally important to measure the longer living as well as its quality.


Analyzing data from eurostat which containts the following two variables:

1- Healthy life years: Is a health expectancy indicator which combines information on mortality and morbidity.


2- Life expectancy: Life expectancy at birth is defined as the mean number of years still to be lived by a person at birth

Original data is splitted into gender, but here the average was computed between female and male to have only one metric. The last updated data belongs to 2012.

Following plots shows these indicators in a map, Each metric is expressed in years.

Life expectancy (left) Vs. Healthy life years (right)

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Top 3 – Countries

Here we can see that top 3 countries with the highest healthy life, are not the top 3 highest with longer life expectancy.

Gap healthy life

Now we’ve know how “expectancy” and “healthy” is distributed, we proceed to compute the gap among them, generating a new metric called “Gap healthy life”


This metric tends to be higher when people live more years in a no-good life condition until their final days, on the other side this value is close to 0 when people tends to live all their life in good condition, let’s life expectancy and life quality have similar values.

To reflect quantitavely the most dissimilar (left) and the most equitative (right), following table was created:

Final thoughts

It’s interesting to note how many years people lives in a bad quality of life until their dead, like Germany which their good living ends at the age of 57, while their life expectancy is around 81 years.


Looking at Slovenia which holds the highest gap, we can see their people lives 35% of their lifes in a bad-quality (healthy: 52 vs expectancy:80.2 years)




One further analysis could be to analyze these metrics, across the time to see global trends.

Contact

Made by Pablo C. from Data Science Heroes.


E-learning course: Data Science with R request free demo in [email protected]



Note: For a live and dynamic graph version, please go here


R Code & data available in github