Health AI: How Apple can boost public health

Combined with its existing solutions, Apple’s strategic approach to artificial intelligence (AI) deployment could make a radical difference to public health. Here is how it could achieve that.

Apple has already told us that achieving better health through better choices is fundamental to its approach. “Our goal is to empower people to take charge of their own health journey,” said Dr. Sumbul Desai, Apple’s vice president of health, in 2023. 

While knowledge is power, anyone who’s ever sent themselves into a tidal wave of panic when searching for information on their own symptoms online should know that applying it effectively isn’t always easy. Everyone is different, with varying polarities around health. What works for some might work more effectively if optimized and personalized for others, reflecting unique characteristics such as age, weight, or gender.

Help is coming. We’ve known for a while that Apple hopes to be part of that solution, which is why it is developing AI to optimize the choices people take.

What difference does it make?

Multiple studies show how making better choices can help keep you healthy. It has already been shown that the iPhone and Apple Watch can help identify early onset of dementia, Parkinsons, respiratory diseases, and sleep apnea. More recently, the Apple-introduced Vitals app seems to be providing people with early warnings that they’re about to get sick; the company has also created tools to empower Apple’s customers with better insights into their own mental health. Apple’s vision for health straddles all its devices, including AirPods Pro, which now act as bona fide hearing aids and hearing test systems. 

What problems might these technologies alleviate? 

The World Health Organization predicts diabetes will impact 1.3 billion people by 2050, up from 830 million in 2022. Cardiovascular disease kills 17.9 million people each year. The third biggest killer, chronic respiratory disease, affects around seven in every 100 people on earth. The estimated cost of chronic disease is expected to reach $47 trillion globally by 2030. What all three conditions have in common is that they can in part be mitigated by early intervention lifestyle changes and better self-care decisions. 

Better health, one step at a time

Sure, it’s not a panacea — people near you will still suffer from health problems. But positive lifestyle changes can mitigate, prevent, and manage these conditions, at least some of the time. But, ultimately, it’s not just the lives saved when using Emergency SOS via Satellite from a remote location that matter, it’s also the many that may never encounter problems as a direct result of taking 10,000 steps a day and closing all the Activity rings on their Apple Watch.

The Health app is a major component of all of this. Think of it as a digital hub. Not only does it gather information from all your devices, but it also sucks in data from some third-party services and has the capacity to share and ingest information with health professionals. All those insights are private and personal to you, and Apple wants to keep it that way. 

All of its systems aim to gather as little data as possible about you. When it comes to health, the intention is to ensure your data doesn’t enter the surveillance economy, (though Apple’s privacy commitment could yet be torn apart by clumsy regulation).

But is it safe?

In taking this approach, Apple is grappling with the biggest challenge to wider deployment of AI. In response to the ever-corroding experience of intrusive surveillance advertising and the challenge of privacy protection in a digital age, people are reluctant to share health data. By crafting systems that don’t require direct access to your data, Apple has an opportunity to unlock the potential benefits of personal health AI without also creating another attack surface against digital privacy. 

The risk is that if the company is forced to open up its systems, it might also be forced to open up your personal health data to third-party firms with which you don’t have the same depth of trust. With that in mind, it’s understandable the company might not introduce these systems if regulators insist on exposing personal information to outside companies less committed to privacy.

To avoid this, Apple must convince governments that the benefits of digital privacy far outweigh the costs of removing it. It needs to be able to build a health OS that can support third-party developers while also protecting user data. The prize? The opportunity to build a powerful personalized preventative AI-augmented health care anyone can hook themselves into for the price of an Apple One subscription. The risk? An incredibly intrusive exfiltration of personal information. 

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