PIA: A Personal Intelligence Agent Turning Health Conversations into Records and Records into Understanding

arXiv:2609.31255v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: General-purpose agent memory summarizes conversations: it extracts salient snippets, embeds them, and retrieves the top-k into the prompt. A health agent cannot run on summaries: a dose becomes a sentence, "since last week" is resolved at the model's discretion, and a three-month glucose trend cannot be answered by text similarity. We present PIA, a personal intelligence agent deployed alongside a consumer health agent. PIA receives the agent's natural-language requests, decides for itself whether and how to write or read, and turns conversations into typed clinical records and records into a synthesized understanding of the user. Its memory harness consists of four controls -- extraction, memory, retrieval, and understanding -- each a domain-agnostic mechanism with a pluggable health module: schema, medical alias dictionary, knowledge graph, and temporal rules. We show how the same query receives a different answer as the memory injected into the response context deepens from one-dimensional recall, to a two-dimensional health snapshot, to a three-dimensional trajectory with causality, and report lessons from operation: self-reported health data are missing not at random, question phrasing governs the quality of synthesized understanding, and nearly a third of candidate causal links are structural noise that rules alone remove.