Apple AI Doctor: Transforming Healthcare with Personalized Health Insights

Craig: welcome back to silicon scoop. with me as always, my cohost, john erwin, funding expert and tech geek like myself.

Jon: yeah.

Craig: his first article is apple is reading its biggest push into health yet with its new ai doctor. what's going on here, john?

Jon: yeah. so let me caveat this by skepticism with the things that apple have been releasing lately with their quote, unquote apple intelligence, their quote, unquote, in, improved siri. this is just another line of, i believe, maybe overpromising, under delivering, but we'll have to see. so apple's they're calling it project mulberry. it centers on a completely redesigned health app, which features two ai agents. one is a virtual health coach, and the other is an ai doctor, quote, unquote. so what they're saying that it's gonna do is these systems are gonna analyze data from iphones, apple watches, third party devices, and then they're gonna generate personalized recommendations for fitness, nutrition, sleep, and chronic conditions like hypertension. the thing that the ai apparently does is that it leverages a few things. it leverages real time camera analysis, so for workout form correction and feedback. it leverages multimodal data fusion, which combines heart rate, blood oxygen, sleep patterns, and dietary inputs, which the dietary inputs come through this new food tracking feature. i don't know. and also llms. so the llms are trained on medical datasets, which are curated by in house physicians and external specialists in cardiology, nutrition, and mental health. so the thing that makes this seem kind of viable is that the ai training pipeline includes reinforcement learning from human feedback, so r l rlhf, where physicians validate outputs to ensure alignment with best practices. so, yeah, we've got this cool thing. i'm skeptical that it's actually gonna work. what do you think, craig? you're not on the stage, by the way.

Craig: thank you. sorry. our internet went out here. i'm switched to my cell phone. it looks like it might be back up, but i'm not convinced. i don't wanna switch over just yet. it's interesting. i'm always skeptical of these things for a number of reasons. one, i have experimented with a bunch of these, maybe not quite as much as you have, but they never track my sleep properly, which has always been an issue. so i take a step back and say, okay. what it says ai doctor, but what can it do? it's like it provides, video content. it's an add on to fitness plus, so you can film yourself doing exercises, and it'll correct your form, like or show you what you're doing wrong and that kind of thing. it'll provide video content, like, for nutrition, sleep, cardiology, analyze your workout, monitor your chronic health conditions, like your, the regular regularity of your heart rate

Jon: yeah.

Craig: that kind of stuff. so it it doesn't actually do doctor y stuff.

Jon: no. so it's no, it it yeah. they're calling it an ai doctor, but it's not really an ai doctor. so

Craig: yeah. that's what i'm trying to get at.

Jon: yeah. so it's got it it does it it does do ai doctor stuff in the background kind of thing, but it's not an ai doctor per se. does that make sense?

Craig: yes. yeah. yeah. because it's tracking your heart rate. it's doing some stuff, but it's you know, if it integrates with, like, your electronic health care records if you want. it can offer insights about a bunch of things. it can help you schedule appointments and do some predictive analysis and things. but, you know, it can't diagnose medical conditions. it won't replace traditional health care solutions. it doesn't guarantee perfect accurate health insights, you know, and potential for ai to hallucinate. so i i guess my biggest problem with this is i don't like the fact that they called it an ai doctor. it's more of a you

Jon: need it. ai apple sale, i think.

Craig: yeah. you know, it's, ai health care assistant, adviser, you know, keep up with that.

Jon: that's you know? ai fitness. that's all it is. and who knows what to be with ai, like like, with apple. so i've got this i don't know if you can see it. no. you can't. oh, yeah. the ring. so i've got i think this tracker ring that i use, and it's got a bunch of sensors in it. and it sleep horribly. and like you like like anything that you've tried, it does not track sleep very well. it's pretty good at the heart rate and resting heart rate and all that sort of stuff. but, i'm curious. yeah. i'm based on apple's fails on anything ai related, i'm skeptical about this even working.

Craig: yeah. and so i take a step back as we go through it, and i say, that's exactly the reason why apple's doing this. i think, they're not collecting your data unless you do, sign up for all this stuff. and so if you sign up for fitness or this new ai doctor service, it's gonna collect all this data and be able to feed its ai where it's way behind. right? where it'll be able to do off device stuff because you've signed up for this thing where, typically, it's all has to be on device because it's keeping your stuff private. i think this opens up, for those of you who don't follow, apple's got some is way behind on ai and for a number of reasons. one, they don't like to, share your data, take your data, and aggregate it. so i love it. yeah. which is great. and two, they're focused on device ai. so that is part of the whole reason. like, because you can do the processing of what it is you're on device, you don't have to send it to servers. that means they can't they don't have to keep it. right? that's why they so but at the same time, that means their ai processing power is severely limited. what they can do with it is severely limited. but now they can take steps like this and say, alright. you signed up for our health care app. we're gonna monitor your heart rate, your exercise, everything you eat, everything you do, your form, this, that. and millions and millions of people will sign up for this because apple will give it away for free for six months if you get a new device or whatever. and they're gonna start collecting millions of day, data on this, which will only help feed their ai to become actually a better health care monitoring app. so i agree with you. at first, i don't trust is not a good word. i don't rely on this to actually do a lot more than what it does today. yeah. but at the same time, they're putting the, heartbeat monitors in the headphones. and that's gonna be able to do more and more. i don't know all the patent stuff related to the new headphones coming out. so this will be interesting to see. and, in fact, actually, it's not just the new ones coming out. i think, it's software to airpod pro twos that you can go back to that have it. of course. new, the new beats pro has it. so those types of things are adding on. so we're getting to a better place where we can actually get to the quantified self. remember, what was it, twenty years ago when everyone was tracking everything to become a quantified self and, yeah, tracking all that stuff, and it became a very big, a thing maybe about twenty years ago, ten years ago, whatever it was. but then now we're starting to get to the places where we're tracking enough stuff

Jon: okay.

Craig: we can get to that point. right? like, our watches are monitoring our heart rate almost twenty four hours a day. we're taking it every few minutes. we're we're monitoring what you eat. we're monitoring how you exercise. we're monitoring all these things semiautomatically. so now it becomes way easier to look at all these data and say, okay. how do i relate what i ate, what i did, what i drank, to how badly i'm sleeping?

Jon: yeah. yeah. so i'll be curious. like, there are apps that kind of do this already. i'm curious to see what their nutritional, whatever thing is that they're gonna do. but, yeah, i'm i'm i'm curious. i again, they're charging $10 a month, it seems like, for this. so, i'm yeah. again

Craig: it it seems crazy. like, when you think about why build this stuff into the device and then charge for it? hydration tracking. well, what does that mean exactly? i, these are non, invasive glucose monitoring, which is a game changer. if they get that patent, then they're allowed to your watch can monitor your glucose levels. so that's a good thing. yeah. they talk about hydration tracking, but i'm not sure exactly. does that mean you have to tell it how much you're drinking? because anything like that doesn't work very well, or does it track it based on something else? comprehensive sleep monitoring, that's great. if it actually works, activity actually measures heart rate variability. so there's some interesting stuff, that it tracks. i just don't know if it's actually going to be worth the value. and you're right. it's an extra $10. so it's an extra $10 on top of, i think, apple fitness plus.

Jon: yeah. okay. i don't know. the only thing i like apple is macbook pros. everything else, i can't stand, so you would know more than i would.

Craig: well, it's historically, a lot of the functionality that's in fitness was just built into the, apps and built into the system. but somehow, they've taken that out and wanna make you to pay a monthly fee for

Jon: that now. so, it

Craig: is what it is. i don't find that fitness plus is great, because they're they're hyping up, you know, the, what do you call that? what was that bike that was so popular, that it

Jon: would have

Craig: yeah. they're pumping up that kind of experience where you have the group exercise, you've got the trainer, you got the person to follow so you can pick your exercise routine. that'll give you the music and pump you up and all that kind of stuff, which is okay, if you want that. yeah. but, you know, some people just want some basic tracking functionalities of what they do so they can record it and put through all that stuff. and they don't wanna have to pay all that extra because they don't care about video coaching. they don't care about all these other things. so, it's it it is interesting where they divided those lines and, really taken some functional well led away from other people. and if you're into that, peloton, the group thing, the challenges, that's great. but there's plenty of other apps out there, like, i'm trying to remember the running ones and all that where they have the competitive, stuff out there. so if you are involved in a group of runners, you probably won't be using this because they all won't be using this. they'd be using some standard third party app that this will report into. so you could work out with your running group and compare your stats and that kind of stuff. so it's it's not for everyone is all i'm saying. and yeah. the features aren't necessarily for everyone. and i again, going back to this, i really don't like that they're calling this, ai doctor because, you know but i like that we're getting more and more tracking. yes. if we can have alerts going out or something happens to someone automatically, like, you know, help my phone and i can't get up type alerts and stuff, we're getting more and more to this. and if we get more and more tracking for people, especially as you get older, i forget. this? have i done that? you know? and i don't consider myself that old, but i'm definitely older. you definitely would like tools like this to, hey. you're you haven't exercised enough today or you haven't done this or you have or what have you to help you

Jon: along those ways. yeah. the nudging. yeah. yeah.

Craig: you know, the nudging to eat, the nudging to hydrate, the nudging to do whatever from that perspective. i'm looking forward to a healthier society. i'm just not sure if everyone's willing to pay an extra $10 a month for it.

Jon: yeah. that's a lot more expensive than i i think it's more expensive than aura, i think aura is 6 or $7 a month. and they have a like, that's dedicated. they like, so knows? who knows if the price point is going to deliver on functionality and features? but based on their history with anything ai related, they've failed. so, we'll have to see if this is their first win.

Craig: yeah. so let us know what you think. are you jumping on this bandwagon? because you're all in on, health stuff in apple and how they're going? are you favor some other platform or neither of those things? let us know. leave comments below.