Rossiter hopes that keeping elderly people mobile for longer could keep them happy and out of care homes, potentially prolonging their life.

A current stumbling block is finding a power source small enough to work inside the body, but Rossiter hopes that that wireless charging could be used in the future.

“We could implant the power supply into the body along with the muscles,” he says. “And then when you’re lying in bed, the bed itself is charging your muscles.”

Artificial intelligence-powered drug discovery

Many technology start-ups are turning to artificial intelligence (AI) as a way to chew through the vast amounts of data about diseases and existing medicines in an attempt to discover new drugs, or repurpose existing ones.

Start-ups such as London-headquartered BenevolentAI hope that their use of machine learning, a form of AI which can gradually teach itself, could lead to innovative treatments that can slow down the ageing process.

It’s a concept which has excited anti-ageing researchers such as Aubrey de Grey, the chief science officer of the SENS Foundation.

“A very important advance has been made over the past few years,” he says. “In the anti-ageing space, it’s particularly important.”

“The use of state of the art machine learning techniques is really working,” he adds.

Siow hopes that these companies could find new uses for anti-inflammatory drugs, which could help to slow down the ageing process.

“That is a hot area of research. It’s not a wonder pill, but it could be.”

Cryonics

Making the human body so cold that it improves circulation or enables the preservation of organs after death is an established concept. Now, a new generation of technology businesses are hoping to breathe new life into the field.

Cryonics, preserving our bodies after death in the hope that they could one day be brought back to life, is perhaps the most popular manifestation of this technology. One advocate for this is de Grey, a long term customer of cryonic business Alcor and a member of its scientific advisory board.

Nectome is hoping to shake up the field. It has received backing from the prominent Silicon Valley start-up “accelerator” Y Combinator, which also backed Stripe, Airbnb and Reddit.

The business hopes to use cryonics to preserve people’s brains. On its website, it says it considers the idea of long-term memory extraction to be “underexplored.”