Health app's future AI assistant will tell you how to keep fit
The Apple Health app could offer AI-based coaching to users in a similar way to a real doctor, with food tracking also likely to be a big feature in a future app update.
Apple Health icon
The Health app is used as a central store for a user's health metrics. Compiling together data collected from hardware like the Apple Watch and from its own sensors to give users an overall view of their fitness and health.
While the current app can identify and notify on trends and other insights, a future version of the app could offer a lot more help. Thanks to the use of artificial intelligence.
According to Mark Gurman in Bloomberg's newsletter on Sunday, Apple is working on Project Mulberry. An initiative to rework the Health app as well as adding a health coach.
The idea is that a new AI agent would monitor the data in the Health app and provide feedback to the user on how to improve their health. This will apparently work to offer advice similar to how a real doctor would to a patient.
Apple is reportedly training the AI with data from in-house physicians. It is also planning to work with outside experts on sleep, nutrition, physical therapy, mental health, and cardiology.
Those experts will provide video content for the app, to educate users on topics such as heart disease or ways to improve their lifestyle. This will all be filmed at a new Apple facility near Oakland, California.
A major medical personality is apparently being sought by Apple, who will be the host of the app's extra services. This could be under the title of "Health+."
As for when the new app could arrive, Gurman writes that a release could happen as early as iOS 19.4, or about a year away.
Beyond doctors
While the main feature of the revised app would be the AI assistant, there are also other changes on the horizon, according to the newsletter.
Food tracking will be an important element, expanding on the existing limited nutrition feature of the Health app. While Gurman doesn't say what will be changed, it will apparently see Apple going against other established food tracking services, such as MyFitnessPal.
The AI agent will also apparently help users with nutritional needs.
Apple is also planning on improving how users actually work out.
It is proposed that Apple could use cameras on the back of the iPhone or iPad to capture footage of users working out. The AI agent could then study the workouts and provide tips to improve their technique.
This goes beyond the current Apple Watch-based Fitness+ workouts, which monitor the motion of the wearable, to give more practical workout advice. It may also be integrated into the Fitness+ platform itself.
A long workout
Apple has been working on the concept of enhanced health and fitness tools for a number of years already. Previously known as Project Quartz, this has included claims over the years that Apple has been working on using machine learning and AI to offer a coaching service to users.
Despite the lengthy development time, the AI health agent could offer Apple a near-term win versus waiting for hardware changes.
Apple has been working on features such as a non-invasive glucose monitor and blood pressure monitoring for the Apple Watch for many years. However, technical roadblocks have repeatedly caused problems for its development.
Rumor Score: Possible
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Comments
Considering how many truly idiotic mistakes AI systems make there’s no way I would trust it. Maybe in 20-30 years, but today? Hell no we’re still at the stage where AI systems recommend adding glue to pizza sauce.
They should have exercises specifically suited to the super obese who are going to try and get into better shape. The vast majority of what Apple offers is for those whom are already super fit. The rest seems aimed at people with standard body weights who want a gentler session.
My wife and I have had this on our Huawei Health apps for sometime but we don't use the AI planning as it's a subscription service add-on.
It may be a good as a 'prod' to take action and track it as you get back to better health but there is only so much AI can do with limited data.
In our case the system can be tweaked to focus on certain areas of the body and there are a ton of possible suggestions together with the ability to punch in what food and quantities we are ingesting.
If course, it helps to have add-on devices working in tandem with the Health software too.
We have watches for some health metrics and a smart scales as well.
Perhaps, if we were in need of serious prodding, we would take out an AI subscription but our reality is that we are already as healthy as we can be given our ages and medical health (non-alcoholic fatty liver, cardiac events and type 1 diabetes).
Chemically, we are the best we've ever been but age itself means that 'mechanically' we are going to run into problems that no AI programme will ever solve. As it is, we already have specialists arguing about what is best for certain conditions as they will often focus on their specialty and ignore the rest. Then it's up to the family doctor to 'tie' everything together and make sense of it all.
AI is great for pattern analysis but it needs clean, very personalised data to offer more and that brings other issues such as data integrity, privacy and ultimately, security.
I would love to be able to pump my decades worth of accumulated health data into AI and have it crunch away and make a forecast on the coming years (something that to a large degree would have to be taken with a grain of salt).
That though could have the ability to warn people of potential chronic lifestyle issues such as type 2 diabetes.
My brother would probably have benefitted from that as he would have been more receptive of an AI-data-driven results than hearing my mother tell him he was overdoing the BBQs.
It was only when he was carted of by ambulance that he changed his lifestyle for the good but lifestyle illnesses are years in the making and years in the correcting.
It is a nice feature to have even with the limitations of what current AI can do but for sure things will improve over time.
This is exactly the kind of thing a real doctor can do, and an AI will never pick up.
In fact I just tried AI on you scenario. It did well: See https://www.perplexity.ai/search/if-a-student-has-bleeding-gums-tbibelbERz2P6eelAAzCnQ
At the moment real intelligence can be the common sense go-to instead of artificial intelligence in many cases but for the task of general health there is no reason the two can't work together with success, but like I said before, it's going to need data.
No way this is a "doctor." But I could see it being useful. Apple Health has a ton of data. I'd label it more as a coach, which I'm pretty certain has been rumored before.
That doesn't mean it isn't foolproof. Like with anything, understand that it can get things wrong. And know that this will not diagnose anything, but could recommend an appointment or ways to mitigate things. Some people just aren't aware of their bad habits, so having a tool that warns you is useful.
I wonder if this means Apple Health will get more abilities to log information directly. Sorry Foodnoms, you might get sherlocked.