Can artificial intelligence guide you to better health?

For certain people, a fitness tracker like a Whoop band, FitBit, Apple Watch, Oura Ring, or Garmin smartwatch can provide useful, actionable insights into their daily behaviors. They might feel more mindful of their marathon training and sleeping patterns, or maybe they just like using some kind of expensive reminder to live a little healthier. Now, artificial intelligence is appearing in these devices. Whether this is a feature or a bug depends on who you ask.

Whoops’ new feature, Whoop Coach, is powered by the OpenAIs GPT-4 model. This coach, in the form of a chat interface, will attempt to answer users’ open-ended questions based on the reams of health data that the Whoop band collects, such as blood oxygen, skin temperature, heart rate, and respiratory rate. Users can now ask why am I tired? or what should I do at the gym today? and spit out an answer. If users can’t stop thinking about the Roman Empire and want to work on it, Whoop Coach will boldly respond with some suggestions.

Whoop appears to anticipate that not all users will be interested in AI, as the product announcement also explains how you can disable the new feature if you wish. Emily M. Bender, professor at the University of Washington and one of the Time MagazineThe 100 most influential people in AI expressed skepticism, tweeting, “GPT4 is in on this thing.” So: are we talking days, hours or minutes before we see the first reports of physically dangerous advice?

But some people are interested in it, with positive reviews ranging from nothing to complain about to ushering in an era of truly smart wearables. When less than a quarter of American adults meet the recommended amount of exercise, maybe a little nudge from AI won’t be so bad.

Elsewhere, runners have asked ChatGPT to create training plans for them. One such plan left a positive first impression on a senior Polar researcher, considering it a solid starting point for many runners. This impression may be the reason why AI has taken off in the training world: sometimes it is more important to receive instructions than the instructions themselves. Maybe if people to feel they are receiving a personalized training plan, they are more likely to follow it, even if a hypothetical TrainerBot has three templates that it distributes to all users.

There is already a lot of interest and investment in AI in the world of cardiovascular health. For one thing: Earlier this month, Cardiosense, a digital biomarker platform, began enrollment in a national study to use its AI platform and FDA-designated Breakthrough device to monitor heart failure, a much higher-risk venture than building a couch for 5k flat.

But there are also reasons to be cautious. Earlier this year, the National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA) put Tessait’s own AI chatbot, which replaced a human-based helpline, on ice after it was found to give dangerous eating disorder advice.

AI in fitness trackers will seem like a tremendous feature to some people and more of a bothersome bug to others. I fall into this last camp. I already had an on-and-off relationship with Whoop before OpenAI got involved. I’ve found that a fitness tracker can quickly become a handcuff to a bunch of metrics that take up a disproportionate amount of my mental space. I’m not sure an AI model fixes this.