Apple seems to be gambling next on the artificial intelligence with plans to overhaul its Health app entirely and house some ‘AI doctor’-like service, Bloomberg reported. Such a move also complies with CEO Tim Cook’s stance that healthcare could possibly become the most significant contribution by the Cupertino-based tech giant to mankind.
“To borrow a phrase from a well-known saying, if you zoom out into the future, and into the past, and ask yourselves the question, ‘What really was Apple’s most important contribution to mankind?’ it is going to be health,” the Apple CEO said during a 2019 event.
According to the famed Apple whisperer Mark Gurman, non-invasive glucose measurement for the Apple Watch is still many years from becoming a reality. Meanwhile, the health team at Apple is considering different ways of using AI to enrich the lives of its users.
Apple’s plans for AI doctor:
As stated on the Bloomberg website, Project Mulberry is where Apple’s team is focusing on remodeling the Apple Health application. The project aims to create a health coach with an AI agent, incorporating some of the diagnostics by an actual health practitioner.
It is reported that the upcoming Health app from Apple will collect information from all the user’s devices, like the iPhone, Apple Watch, earbuds, and even some third-party products. Then, the AI agent in the app will analyze the data to provide personalized suggestions for improving the user’s health.
How far has Apple’s effort for AI Coach moved?
It is said that Apple is currently training its AI agent on data collected from doctors on its staff, albeit with plans to rope in outside doctors. It was also said that the company, which Tim Cook heads, would be establishing a facility close to Oakland, California, so that doctors could film their video content for the application and may even be interested in a “great doctor personality” who would sort of serve as a host for its reengineered Health application.
The Gurman account does not elaborate much on the doctor personality, which could actually be an attempt to add some human touch to the app, similar to the approach of Google and OpenAI, who brought lay artists in to create the voices for their various chatbots.
The new app will be certainly a high priority for Dr. Sumbul Desai, the chief of Apple’s health unit. Jeff Williams, Apple’s chief operating officer, is likewise making a major commitment to the venture.
Gurman suggests that the project is “in full steam” in development, with the modernized app as early as an iOS 19.4 release. Apple’s iOS 19 will be made public at the WWDC 2025, scheduled on June 9-13, whereas stable updates are expected in September, along with the new iPhone 17.
This is when Apple is expected to release the iOS 18.4 update – April 1 – and if the work on the Health app overhaul goes as planned, we could see the AI Doctor from Apple in action around the same time next year.
Apple’s love-hate relationship with AI:
Despite investing heavily into artificial intelligence recently, Apple has not seen significant returns when other manufacturers like Google and Samsung continue to garner engagement from new features during Apple’s delayed time-to-market of its own innovations.
Apple’s first foray into AI was in iOS 18, which was announced at WWDC 2024 last year. By then, features like Circle to Search were already implemented by competitors Google and Samsung; hence, there were reasons to be optimistic about Apple’s entry into AI; after all, the company has a history of getting features right in their deployment and not rushing them into existence.
The rollout of the so-called Apple Intelligence has been really bumpy by the company when it comes to AI features. Most of the features announcing at WWDC 2024 were nowhere to be seen when the iPhone 16 went on sale last year. Some of these features have released in stages since then.
The Apple News Summary functionality, introduced with the iOS 18.3 beta, had attracted attention about its impropriety after the BBC and several other news outlets ripped it apart. After this, Apple stopped showing AI-generated summaries for news and entertainment apps.
