Will AI Make Us Healthier?

While the mention of AI sparks excitement in some and triggers trepidation in others, its emergence in health and wellness promises to be a game-changer in improving how we manage our health.

Enabling proactivity versus reactivity, it potentially ushers in a new model of well-care versus the long-standing one of sick care. Artificial intelligence is not new. Only recently, has AI made the radar of the mass consumer market under its own moniker and ignited consumer exuberance reminiscent of the introduction of social media back in the 2000’s.

For years, AI was a stealth player operating behind the scenes mostly in business-to-business applications and quietly in consumer ones. You’ve been using it all along, every time you did a Google search or asked Siri a question. Now, AI has emerged from the shadows. What does that mean for our health? A lot.

How Is AI Shaping Healthcare?

When we think of AI, productivity or support AI chatbots may first come to mind, like a new kind of search. In healthcare though, AI is doing so much more. AI models can be trained to perform a number of different functions in healthcare settings, and customization training is key. A few areas to note where AI is quickly gaining momentum in healthcare are:

Diagnostics and Predictive Healthcare:

AI can be trained to analyze huge swaths of data and establish correlations and identify patterns in scientific and patient datasets to identify early signs of disease. These applications benefit and have implications for both clinical and research settings.

In pathology and radiology, AI can detect deviations in images, such as in X-rays and on slides, much better than the human eye. For example, AI has proven to be effective in screening for cancers. By reading breast images for breast cancer (“one 2025 study AI-assisted mammography detected 29% more breast cancers and 24% more early-stage tumors,” and for other cancers, it can identify blood markers.

AI can even determine effective potential treatment options considering personal genetics and the cancer’s characteristics. Many more examples are available. AI can improve screening for chronic disease (“one study found speech analysis AI could predict Alzheimer’s with nearly 80% accuracy six years before diagnosis,” as well as for disease complications such as detecting diabetic retinopathy in ophthalmology.

Personalized Medicine:

By analyzing a person’s genomics along with other key health metrics and biomarkers, AI can identify conditions or predispositions to certain conditions for successful early treatment or prevention even before symptoms manifest.

Clinical Support for Health Professionals:

AI can reduce the administrative burden on health professionals. It can provide scribe services for time-consuming note-taking, pull data from electronic health care records (EHR’s), and compile patient information into concise formats.

Physicians can quickly access and research relevant medical studies and information. (They just need to vet that the cases are real.) AI can also aid in patient care via virtual nurses and AI health coaches to improve education and treatment compliance.

AI robotic companions can assist seniors or people with disabilities who have difficulty with the activities of daily living, mobility or who need medication reminders.

However, humans still need a human touch. The ideal outcome would be that health care professionals will have more time to deliver high quality care, spend more time with patients, and suffer less stress and burn out themselves.

The hope is that it does not bring an even heavier workload for these professionals and health care systems don’t deploy it to prioritize profits at the expense of patients and caregivers.

Drugs:

Drugs take a long time to develop from start to approval, on average about 10 years, and not all drugs successfully make it through the pipeline. Although repurposing existing drugs for new applications is also lengthy, it is a shorter proposition. AI algorithms can “effectively identify candidates for drug repurposing” that are more likely to result in effective treatments.

Another area that costs lives and money is adverse drug reactions (ADEs). ADEs become especially challenging with very sick patients in hospitals who are on multiple drugs simultaneously. “ADEs typically extend hospital stays by two to three days and cost hospitals an estimated $4B annually.” “Customized AI models built to catch these events in one hospital prevented more than 2000 ADEs over two years.”

Robotic Assisted Surgery and Custom-designed Bio-prosthetics via 3D Printers:

AI applications like Intuitive Surgical and Auris Health are “developing robotic-assisted surgical platforms for complex procedures. Stratasys is one company that “develops custom prosthetics, surgical models, and bioprinting.”

How Can You Leverage AI for Your Health?

One of the most popular and exploding categories in health AI today is that of personalized wellness. Remember a few decades back when runners and walkers wore heart monitors and used step counters? Looking back, we have come a long way. It’s mostly due to advances in AI.

How can you personally harness AI to become healthier? It is a smorgasbord out there offering many choices—too many to cover all of them here. It’s about focusing on what you are seeking and determining what works best for your needs and what tools you most enjoy using. Here are a few suggestions to get you started on your exploration:

Personalized Nutrition and Diet, Healthy Recipes, and Grocery Lists:

One busy professional I know gets all her recipes from ChatGPT, especially during her work week. With ChatGPT, you can customize your preferences, allergies, ingredients on hand, and even the time you have to cook. Other options are DishGen and Yummly. Once you have your recipes in hand for the week, you can prompt ChatGPT to create grocery lists.

For more customization in creating lists, try AnyList or Bring! AI-driven wellness platforms like Lumen and Noom can provide personalized guidance on nutrition and weight loss among their other features. Nutrigenomix tests your genes to find the perfect personalized “DNA diet” for you.

Fitness and Customized Workout Programs:

This huge subset of wellness AI is growing and improving rapidly. And it is getting even more personal every day. This area is ripe for rapid innovation. Here tools range from libraries of passive exercise videos found in Fitbod to custom routines and progress tracking found in GymGenie.

We are starting to see tools that can personalize and customize feedback for each user even focusing on precise form in performance—important for any pro or amateur athlete to avoid injury.

For yoga, check out YogaFi, a smart yoga trainer which features yoga instruction with a yoga mat with built-in sensors that provides instant feedback if your position is correct.

For those who want strength and weight training, Amp is an AI powered home gym sleek enough to fit into almost any space. Introduced for IRL (in real life) cyclists and now expanded to runners, walkers, and hikers, Strava provides performance tracking, plans routes, and has a social interface to connect and compete with friends and family.

Wearables and health monitoring tools provide all kinds of metrics to help us make informed decisions on when to go at it hard and when to ease up training. Tools like Oura and Whoop provide detailed insights and data to support you on your health and fitness journey as well as former standbys like FitBit and Apple Watch.

Social Well-being and Mental Health:

AI tools can offer support for behavioral change via suggestions for cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and mindfulness and meditation exercises to alleviate anxiety, induce sleep, help with setting intentions, and goal setting.

Some useful tools here are Calm and Headspace for sleep meditation and mindfulness, Oura for sleep and stress monitoring and meditation (as well as other monitoring features). Apps like Happify can help you overcome negative thoughts, create new habits, and find purpose and structure. For goal and intention seeking, try Daylio or Intentions.

AI Challenges, Caution for the Future:

While many advantages come with AI, as we learned with the evolution of social media and its negative impacts, we as a society need to navigate AI responsibly. AI is a fast-moving sector. Developers and companies must be mindful to proceed with respect, safety and caution for users and consider the following when building AI models.

AI models are created from the training data they are fed, and this data can reflect built-in biases. For example, until recently much of the research data collected consisted of data on men versus women, and variations found in ethnic populations may also not be fully or fairly represented.

One of the biggest concerns is over privacy, as these apps and solutions are gathering very personal data which fuels concerns over surveillance as well as security and data breaches. For example, be mindful of allowing AI to record and store conversations in your Zoom calls, particularly any confidential business information.

Informed consent and transparency to users as to how data is collected, used, stored, shared, and analyzed is necessary. There must be compliance with current regulations such as HIPAA, and Europe’s GDPR, and the AI Act as well as those yet to come. Guardrails must be created and embraced by companies based on safe and best practices that will guide policy and inform regulation.

In healthcare, lives are at stake. We must be aware that AI is not always right. It can hallucinate and potentially deliver inaccurate and even “harmful recommendations.” Providers and researchers need to rely on their expertise and instincts and provide oversight to ensure the best outcomes. Developers need to narrow the window as much as possible, so these mistakes do not happen, especially in healthcare setting applications.

Lastly, we need to ensure we do not become over-reliant or even addicted to these technologies. Addiction to devices and their applications is a real thing, resulting in screen burnout, depression, isolation, and loneliness, which all negatively impact our health. Human to human connection is important and must stay at the top of our personal plan to achieve ultimate well-being.

Note: Nothing in this article constitutes medical advice. Please consult your health care professional if you have questions before undertaking any physical activity or dietary changes or adopting any of these health technologies.