Apple thinks it has found a better use for AI than making it easy to search your photo library — putting a personal health team on your phone.
What happened: Apple is planning to launch a powered-up version of its Health app as early as next spring, per Bloomberg, with the aim of replicating some of the work done by health professionals, including:
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Doctors: The improved Health app will pull in data from your devices and use AI to generate recommendations for improving your health based on what it finds. Some of that advice will be delivered through videos prerecorded by actual doctors.
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Nutritionists: The app will reportedly include food tracking, allowing users to record what they eat and offering nutrition suggestions based on their diet and health metrics.
- Trainers: Users will also be able to use their phone’s camera to record their workouts and get feedback on their form.
Why it matters: Apple CEO Tim Cook has said the company’s greatest contribution to the world will be in health care, but its current offering is closer to a high-end step tracker. The company hopes its vast amount of data on its users, coupled with increasingly powerful AI models, will allow it to achieve Cook’s vision.
- Apple has been laying the groundwork to use data from its 2.2 billion active devices for real-world products in the personal health space, including through a recent study involving 400,000 participants.
Yes, but: Apple has had grand visions for transforming healthcare in the past (including Steve Jobs’ plan to sense if Apple Watch users were prediabetic) that haven’t materialized — time will tell if this effort is different.—TS