Alongside the Pixel Watch 4 (and family of Pixel 10 devices), Google also introduced a new “personal health coach” today at its Made By Google event. A preview of it will begin rolling out in October as part of the Fitbit app to Premium users in the US. The app is also getting a redesign which the company says will be “available with the latest Fitbit trackers, Fitbit smart watches and Pixel watches.”
The first thing Fitbit users may notice is a visual refresh. In place of the current organization system, the bottom of the screen will feature four tabs: Today, Fitness, Sleep and Health. The home page (Today) will still feature daily progress stats in the form of bars and rings at the top, though these are now customizable so you can display your favorite metrics there.
Below this is a feed of your upcoming workouts, recent activity and progress reports served in individual cards that you can tap into for more information. This layout, with data visualizations at the top and a feed that follows, is the same across all four tabs.
At a recent demo, the company’s director of product management for Fitbit and health Andy Abramson showed us how his app surfaced his weekly cardio load in a ring, with bars to its right for his steps, readiness and sleep performance. “We call these our focus metrics,” he said. These are in a color scheme that will be familiar to Fitbit users, with purple continuing to be the color representing sleep data and teal for steps. But there’s a few more updates that Google says “address common user suggestions,” and these include easier layouts, more intuitive data visualization, “improved syncing — and of course, dark mode.”
Google didn’t just give the Fitbit app a makeover. It said that coaching and AI were at the core of the redesign, and that the “entire app was rebuilt so the health coach can understand your goals, build your plan, contextualize your metrics and bring insights at the right moments.”
Abramson said that his team sought to figure out “How do we put the AI coach in every part of the app?” Instead of simply tucking the AI features into a dedicated tab, “We actually need to tie it together.”
To that end, a floating “Ask Coach” button is on every page of the app at the bottom right, and tapping it will take you into a conversation window with the Gemini-powered AI. This button is accessible across all the tabs in the updated app, and you can ask it questions about all the data you’ve provided to Fitbit.
On your first time using the new app, you’ll be prompted to have a conversation with the AI coach, where it will ask about your goals, available equipment and any preferences, injuries or other relevant medical history. Those will go into an area called “Coach Notes,” that you can access in the Health tab and see what the app knows about you. There, you can delete things you don’t want in there any more.
If you only have a few free weights and a rowing machine, for example, the coach can build a custom plan that suggests a variety of weights-based exercises interspersed with sessions on your rower. But if you tell it at any point that you might be looking to incorporate outdoor runs into your routine, it can do so. Abramson told the app he wanted to get better at trail runs, for example, and in the version of the app I saw, that guidance affected a lot of the recommendations he was served. As he had told it he was traveling and had access to a hotel gym, it also suggested some activities on the facility’s Peloton bike.
In future versions of the AI coach, you might be able to integrate with Gemini Live and point your camera around your (or your hotel’s) gym to get the system to identify what equipment is available and generate suggestions based on that. For now, all input to the app is limited to text, which means you may still need to know the difference between a barbell, a Y-bell and a dumbbell.
The coach will build programs based on the info you supply, and these will come with detailed instructions and “metric targets that focus on weekly progression.” If you’re familiar with the cardio load and readiness score features that Google and Fitbit have rolled out in recent years, it’s easy to see how the concept has been developing over time. Your activity progress should not be judged on a daily basis — too many variables could affect whether you were able to get in a run or 10,000 steps on any given day.
Instead, a more forgiving and holistic approach would be to consider weekly movement. If, like me, you tend to get in two cardio days, two strength days and one HIIT day a week, you won’t be penalized for not getting cardio in on a weights day. Or say you put in too many hours at work one day, writing a long article late into the night. The AI coach will recognize that you didn’t get as much sleep as usual and adjust your target cardio load accordingly. Google said the coach will make “real-time check-ins and adjustments” and that if you let the system know you’ve hurt your back, it will give you tips on how to modify your workouts.
Part of the update to the Fitbit app includes new sleep algorithms that Google says make it more accurate, providing “a more precise understanding of your sleep duration and stages.” The coach also guides you to get better sleep, by studying your patterns over the week and sharing insights on how to improve things over time. If it notices that on weekdays you take a longer time than usual to fall asleep, for example, it might recommend heading to bed or turning off your devices earlier. If it thinks you might be jetlagged, it could suggest sleep schedules to help you re-adjust to new timezones. Finally, the sleep coach might look at your energy expenditure each day and recommend a bedtime that could get you 30 minutes of extra rest to get over a particularly grueling workout you undertook that morning.
In time, the Fitbit coach will get data from a variety of sources, as it will support Health Connect and HealthKit to get things like your glucose levels or your weight and body composition from your smart scale or other connected devices.
Google also says that in addition to helping you get personalized insights based on your activity and rest, its AI coach can help make sense of an overwhelming amount of data noise. That’s not just the information overload from all the different metrics your wearable might collect, but also the fact that there is a ton of content out there today that Google says is “written for everyone in general and no one in particular.”
Since it has access to a wealth of data about you and a gigantic knowledge base from the internet, the coach can filter out noise to give you pertinent answers to your questions. You can ask things like “I’m feeling stressed right now. What can I do?” or “What are the best exercises for weight loss” and, according to Google, “get truly personalized answers that are backed by science.” The system will also serve up timely and regular reports on your performance and any trends or changes.
Using AI to make sense of the overwhelming amount of data collected by our wearables seems like a smart approach, but it’s not without its drawbacks or concerns. Will your sensitive information be safely guarded? What type of information will the AI Coach serve and how trustworthy is that guidance?
Google appears to be attempting to get ahead of those concerns, saying it is “committed to building our personal health coach with leading industry experts and through scientific research.” It’s partnered with Stephen Curry “and his performance team,” and is “working closely with our Consumer Health Advisory Panel, a diverse group of leading experts in medicine, AI and behavioral science.”
I think it’s imperative that Google state very clearly that its AI Coach can not replace a doctor, a registered dietitian or a certified coach, and that it has guardrails in place to prevent aggressively pushing a person towards dangerous outcomes. The good news is, Google is well aware that it will have work to do, and is clear that it is “releasing this experience as a preview so you can help shape it as we make regular improvements.”
For now, the AI is designed to help with fitness and sleep insights and recommendations, though it’s worth noting that Fitbit has historically considered a broader range of areas including mental health and menstrual cycles as essential components of overall wellbeing. In future, the AI Coach may also cover those types of data.
If you’re keen to test the redesigned Fitbit app and new personal health coach out, you’ll have to be a Fitbit Premium subscriber, be based in the US and sign up to get notified when the preview is available in October.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/a-closer-look-at-googles-ai-health-coach-and-the-redesigned-fitbit-app-160041881.html?src=rss https://www.engadget.com/ai/a-closer-look-at-googles-ai-health-coach-and-the-redesigned-fitbit-app-160041881.html?src=rssInicia sesión para agregar comentarios
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