How we are building the personal health coach

The personal health coach is built with Gemini models to deliver personalized and adaptive coaching, grounded in science and informed by expert oversight.

Historically, health and fitness journeys have been fragmented, generic and inaccessible, whether within existing apps or through general health and fitness journeys outside of apps. For instance, a primary care provider might suggest seeing a specialist or losing weight for better diabetes management, but often without providing connections to a nutritionist or fitness coach. This leaves users with the burden of connecting these dots themselves.

Our vision is to address this by offering a proactive, personalized and adaptive AI-powered personal health coach. This coach will seamlessly enable:

• Proactive insights on sleep, fitness and health
• Personalized guidance grounded in behavioral science, established health and wellness principles and individual health metrics, such as activity and other physiological data
• Personalized coaching to set goals and build sustainable habits through actionable, adaptive plans

Starting tomorrow and over the next week, we are rolling out an optional public preview of the health coach for eligible US-based Fitbit Premium Android users and expanding to iOS users soon. Users who opt in to participate will be presented the consent to provide access to their Fitbit data to receive personalized insights.

Steering Gemini for health coaching

“Do I get better sleep after exercising?” sounds like a simple question, but answering it like a proactive, personalized and adaptive coach required several technical innovations.

Third, while foundational models are incredibly capable, careful steer is required for it to be useful in the health and wellness context. We developed evaluations based on consumer health and wellness needs to inform the system instructions and improve upon Gemini’s core capabilities in assisting our users.