There’s a race underway to collect, store, manage, and analyze consumer health and wellness data — and Google just pulled ahead. On May 19, Google parent company Alphabet will begin a global rollout of its new AI-powered health coach in an effort to centralize a user’s health data collected through wearables, labs, telehealth and doctor visits.
“[This launch] signals the next phase of wearables [are] moving beyond passive tracking toward interpreting data and guiding action,” David Hamlette, health and wellness insights manager for Mintel market research firm, told Glossy.
Just under half of all U.S. adults use a smartwatch or fitness tracker today, according to Mintel, but consumers have yet to declare a data management platform as the market leader.
Leading wearable brands certainly want this job, including Oura, Apple, Garmin and WHOOP, which have each optimized their apps to compete to become the health and wellness data hub of choice. For example, Oura added a wellness chatbot trained by a female-focused LLM to gain attention from women earlier this year, while Apple partnered with OpenAI in January to allow the exchange of data between Apple’s Watch and Health app and ChatGPT’s new Health chatbot.
