This is what you can expect from Apple’s AI health coach

Can an Apple health coach make you healthier with the help of artificial intelligence? This is what you can expect from this coach.

Apple health coach: healthier with AI

Apple is working on a coach that will help you become healthier with the power of artificial intelligence. According to Bloomberg this coach uses the data from your Apple Watch to give personal advice about exercising, eating and sleeping.

Bloomberg expect this coach to become a service you pay for monthly. The health coach would be released in 2024.

But what can we specifically expect from such a service? For inspiration, we look at what the competition is already doing. Such as Fitbit with Fitbit Premium, which gives you extra information about your health for a monthly fee.

Is today a good sports day?

Fanatic athletes see a day without exercise as lost, but sometimes it is healthier not to exercise for once. Your body needs time to recover. Especially if you have exercised a lot the day before.

Fitbit Premium offers a daily recovery score for that. This score indicates how smart it is to start exercising again today. With a low score, you better take it easy. For this, the app looks at your activities the previous day, how you slept and your heart rate data.

Look at your iPhone before sleeping

Most trackers and smartwatches let you track all your sleep. The next day you can see exactly how many hours you slept, and how many minutes you were in a deep sleep or REM sleep. You can also view such an overview on the Apple Watch.

What Fitbit is doing now is giving you more insights into your sleep with Fitbit Premium, by giving you a sleep score and explaining how that score came about. In addition, the Fitbit measures whether you snored last night.

What Apple could do is tie the information to your iPhone usage. It is known that looking at your smartphone just before going to sleep does no wonders for your sleep. Partly because of the light of the screen, but also because of all the stimuli if you scroll through TikTok or Instagram, for example. Apple’s health coach can show you that you’ll sleep better if you stop looking at your iPhone in bed.

Are you getting sick?

Since the Apple Watch Series 8, the smartwatch can measure the temperature of your skin. Combine that data with your heart rate and other health data and Apple could predict when you’ll get sick before you feel any symptoms.

See what your blood sugar does

Bloomberg states that Apple’s health coach will also help you eat healthier. How that will work in practice is unclear, because entering everything you eat manually is simply too much work for many.

That will change if a future version of the Apple Watch can monitor your blood sugar levels. That way you can see what food actually does to your body and you can adjust your eating habits accordingly. There have long been rumors that a next version of the Apple Watch will get a glucose monitor and those rumors also exist for the upcoming Series 9.

How is your mental health?

Wearable manufacturers are trying to do more and more about mental health, but the options remain limited for the time being. The wearables from Fitbit, Samsung and Garmin, among others, give users a stress score and you can do a breathing exercise, for example.

Measuring mental health is difficult because it is not as concrete as physical health. Depression or anxiety cannot simply be captured in a graph. But Apple is in a unique position because the company gains insight into your behavior through your smartphone use. And a new emotion tracker will be released in which users can indicate how they feel. Correctly linking that information to data about your physical health can be very valuable.

Privacy first

The problem with many wearables is that it is not clear what exactly happens to your health data. Although Google promised to keep this data separate from data for advertising when it acquired Fitbit, it is still an uncomfortable idea for many that so much extremely personal information ends up with such a data-hungry company.

Apple is known for putting privacy first and that will be no different with this new health data.

Health and your iPhone

Health has always been an important topic for Apple. Just look at the central role of the rings on your Apple Watch and the great Health app on iPhone and soon also iPad. Did you know you can also set a reminder for medications and track your menstrual cycle?