If you buy into the hype, artificial intelligence (AI) is poised to revolutionize the healthcare industry. It has even been suggested that AI health coaching will cure global chronic metabolic disease—big call, right?
Would an AI health coach keep you accountable?
The concept of AI health coaching sounds pretty awesome. Having a digital assistant to communicate personalized health and wellness tips, recommendations and motivational words of encouragement 24/7 seems almost too good to be true. But is the reality of having such individualized health insights at your beck and call, the saviour to the global metabolic health crisis? Will the need for traditional human health coaches be a thing of the past?
In this post we’ll take a deep dive into AI health coach apps. We’ll discuss what apps are currently on the market, what benefits they hold, as well as their limitations.
What Is an AI Health Coach?
An AI health coach is an advanced digital health assistant that provides personalized health recommendations based on your specific needs and goals. AI health coaching brings together two emerging technologies:
- Wearable technology like smartwatches and smart rings (Apple Health, Garmin, Oura ring and Whoop) that collect health metrics like blood oxygen, VO2 max, heart rate, and sleep data.
- Generative-AI technology like Open AI’s ChatGPT, that can “learn” your behavior and provide conversation feedback and guidance using cutting-edge technologies like deep learning, machine learning and natural language processing.
By combining the latest in wearable technology with generative AI, AI health coaching is able to use your personalized biometric data to provide tailored health guidance and motivation 24/7. You can even track your nutrition and enter lab results for a holistic health approach.
Most of us have worn some sort of wearable to track our steps and/or heart rate. But sometimes it’s hard to know exactly what to do with this information. The generative AI technology can gain insight into your daily routine, and by inputting your health goals, your AI health coach can manage your health journey. It can help you integrate impactful lifestyle changes, while taking into account your fitness level and your goals. Whether you’re looking to manage a chronic condition like diabetes, or improve your 5km run time. Theoretically, an AI health coach can keep you motivated and accountable.
AI-Powered Health Coach Platforms
There’s a growing number of AI-powered health coach apps on the market, including ONVY, Humanity, and Oura Advisor. These apps claim to provide personalized accountability based on your goals, individual lifestyle choices and your health biometrics.
There’s a lot of buzz around Thrive AI Health, a new AI health platform that was launched earlier this year. Thrive AI Health has been marked as the next big thing in AI health coaching. Announced in July 2024, this new venture is backed by OpenAI’s Startup Fund and Arianna Huffington’s Thrive global. Thrive AI Health reports that their technology will use large datasets and peer-reviewed science to provide personalized recommendations that go beyond the basics of health and fitness.
The Benefits of an AI Health Coach
The idea of having hyper-personalized 24/7 access to an AI health coach seems pretty awesome. Let’s take a look at the top benefits of this new technology:
Encourages Healthy Habits
An AI life coach or health coach monitors your daily habits and behaviors. Over time generative-AI learns your routine and will help you build healthier habits that then become the foundation of your healthy life. As the AI coach learns your routine, it can provide nudges in a way that is non-intrusive and encouraging to help you stay on track with your health goals. This could be a reminder to drink water, to stay clear of ultra-processed foods or to schedule a 20 minute walk after work.
Managing Mental Health and Wellness
Many of the AI health coach apps offer mental health and wellness support. An AI health coach can offer stress management exercises, personalized meditation prompts or mood-tracking tools to address the mind-body connection, as part of a holistic approach to your overall health plan. This can be a useful strategy to help manage mental well-being, in conjunction with your mental health care provider.
Personalized Recommendations for Health Problems and Chronic Disease Management
AI health coaching apps claim to improve health outcomes by offering targeted interventions based on real-time data. These real-time recommendations are based on your unique health profile. This is achieved by the continuous tracking of health data from a wearable device such as a Garmin or Apple Watch.
In theory, this allows for specific suggestions for managing chronic diseases, such as cardiovascular disease (heart disease) or type 2 diabetes. In turn, an AI health coach will send personalized nudges like modifying your diet, engaging in stress management practices, or improving your sleep quality, to encourage healthier behavior.
While this all seems pretty epic, before taking on any suggestions from your AI health coach, you should always seek guidance from your medical doctor. This is essential if you’re going to allow your AI-powered health coach app to access your lab results and medical history. It’s important to note that there are some major limitations to generative-AI that can impact the validity of these targeted interventions. But more on this later.
Improved Patient Outcomes
The most powerful aspect of AI in healthcare is its ability to process vast amounts of health information from a variety of sources. These include medical records, healthcare apps, devices and clinical trials. By analyzing this data an AI health coach can identify patterns and provide personalized health advice that has the power to improve patient outcomes. If using an AI health coach in this way, it's important to do so in conjunction with a medical professional.
The potential of these AI health apps appears to be like something from a sci-fi movie. But as mentioned previously, there are some major drawbacks to using generative-AI to analyze and interpret lab testing and medical records. These limitations are discussed next.
AI Health Coach Limitations
AI has the potential to revolutionize healthcare, but there are several red flags that need to be addressed. Here are our top concerns when it comes to AI health coaching:
Data Collection and Privacy Concerns
Like all emerging technologies new ethical implications must be considered. When it comes to AI health coaching, privacy concerns around the collection of sensitive health data is a potential red flag. It’s important that all personal health data is protected to avoid inequities in care, or discrimination from third parties such as health insurance companies, or employers.
Inaccurate Health Advice Through AI Bias and AI Hallucination
AI health coaching is not devoid of human bias. The scientists creating the data on which AI was trained may have passed on their own potential biases, and this can lead to AI bias. AI draws its conclusions from the information that it has access to, and the current AI models haven't been exposed to enough health and medical information to make accurate decisions on these data sets.
Generative-AI, like ChatGPT, can get things wrong. In a 2023 study, ChatGPT-4 was given 65 medical questions that are frequently seen in laboratory medicine. The researchers discovered that ChatGPT-4 only answered half of the questions correctly. Most worrisome was a phenomenon known as AI hallucination, that caused ChatGPT to output misleading and completely false responses to over 16 percent of the questions. The scariest aspect of AI hallucination is that these incorrect responses appeared correct based on the terminology used.
More Information Isn’t Always a Good Thing
In theory, having a digital assistant that has access to your personalized health information should lead to effortless healthy living. But the reality is, all this information can become exhausting and overwhelming. It may lead to some people switching off the app, and reverting to their old unhealthy habits.
Why There’s Room for Both Human and AI Health Coaches
There are many positives to AI health coaching. AI is still in its infancy, and its application in the health and medical fields is still very new. The limitations discussed here are very serious, but can be mitigated (to some degree) through human intervention in the form of a human health coach.
We believe that there will always be room for traditional human health coaches in healthcare. There’s something about human connection that AI can’t provide, especially when it comes to accountability. Knowing that there’s someone out there besides you who understands your unique needs, holds immense power and influence over your behavior. Personalized nudges are great, but AI just doesn't cut it in some situations. With an AI health coach you can literally switch off the app, or silence notifications.
Final Thoughts
AI health coaching technology has the potential to revolutionize patient care. Its ability to link to health tracker platforms such as Apple Health, Aura and Garmin allows individuals to have personalized health advice unique to them. But, there are major red flags that limit AI’s role in healthcare at this time. AI-driven diagnostics of lab and other medical data is not accurate and should only be considered under the guidance of a medical doctor.
Whilst the idea of having a personalized nudge specific to your health metrics and lifestyle seems great in theory. But will it make any real difference to an individual’s health and well-being?
Most of us know that fast-food isn’t healthy, and that daily movement is key to longevity. For many people, it’s the busyness of our modern lives that is forcing us to make unhealthy lifestyle choices. Is an AI health coach app going to help you overhaul your stress-filled life? Maybe not.
We believe that the best way to use AI health apps is in conjunction with a human health coach or personal trainer. Someone who can guide you through your major lifestyle changes.
Is hyper-personalization the key to optimal health? We believe AI will pay an integral role of the future of healthcare, but it will need human intervention. We predict huge growth in AI health coaching as technological advancements are made.
