Could an AI Health Agent Transform You?
Review of the New Google - Fitbit Research
🔎 SEARCH for Meaning Podcast / 📙 Dare to Be Vital Book
A couple weeks ago, I visited Google as an invited guest for their Health and Fitness Summit. It was a fascinating experience. The most interesting discussion centered around their new “Personal Health Agent”.
Google recently published “The Anatomy of Personal Health Agent”. This is a detailed 148 page scientific paper about the development of a potentially transformative AI tool.
Here is the stated goal of the project:
“We aim to build a comprehensive personal health agent that is able to reason about multimodal personal health data from everyday consumer wellness devices and medical records and provide personalized health recommendations.”
The team began by trying to understand end-users’ needs. They analyzed real web searches, health forums and gathered qualitative insights from a variety of stakeholders.
The researchers came up with the concept of “Critical User Journeys”. These journeys included questions about the following:
General Health Knowledge
Personal Data Insights
Wellness Advice
Personal Medical Symptoms
Three key skill areas emerged that would be needed to support the consumer health decision making process. Sub-agents focused on these skills were then developed including:
A Data Science Agent focused on analyzing medical records and personal wearable metrics. This agent then compared the information to population-level benchmarks.
A Health Domain Expert Agent that is capable of integrating clinical information into accurate personalized guidance.
A Health Coach Agent that synthesizes insights and facilitates goal setting and measurable progress. (See graphic below)
The paper argues health support requires multiple complementary skills including data analysis, medical reasoning and behavior change support. The Personal Health Agent is designed to synthesize wearable health data, lab values and medical history into personalized and actionable insights.
The Google team worked hard to create a tool based on significant human effort not just AI modeling. See quote below:
“We conducted automated and human evaluations across 10 benchmark tasks, involving more than 7,000 annotations and 1,100 hours of effort from health experts and end-users.”
Vitality Explorer Analysis and Recommendations
Google has developed a powerful AI Health Agent. It evaluates a variety of data sets including the information gathered by our phones, smart watches, bracelets and rings. These devices provide step counts, heart rates and sleep scores.
Incorporating this data with our existing medical records that include blood tests, imaging studies and physical examinations from our physicians is a monumental task. That is why we are struggling to translate this mountain of information into meaning recommendations.
Google’s agent is attempting to do just that with its “Health Coach”. The goal is help people make better decisions and move toward sustainable well-being. Here is a screen shot the coach reviewing fitness and sleep data for a user:
Google just rolled out the its Personal Health Agent for its premium Fitbit users. Here is a review from an early user:
“As with many AI products these days, the best conclusion I can offer is that this would be a cool feature if it worked well—but it currently doesn’t.”
It appears as though Google has much more work to do to make their product meaningful. They must, however, be applauded for trying to integrate a ton of data in search of helpful suggestions. I think we need to stay tuned to see how this AI Health Agent tool evolves.
Please post your comments below and please share this post with someone today to level up their vitality.
🔎 SEARCH for Meaning Podcast / 📙 Dare to Be Vital Book
References:
The Anatomy of a Personal Health Agent. Heydari et al 2025. https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.20148
Review of the Product Link:
https://lifehacker.com/health/i-tried-googles-new-ai-health-coach-and-it-left-me-utterly-baffled test_uuid=02DN02BmbRCcASIX6xMQtY9&test_variant=B
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