An Apple each day becomes your doctor someday. That’s the rumor anyway: Apple is reportedly prepping a Health+ service for launch in 2026 that will use AI to dispense advice on nutrition, exercise and more.
Whether the service will someday give out medical diagnoses remains a much murkier question.
Apple Health+ service would build on current wellness features
Beginning with the iPhone’s simple step tracker, Apple has steadily expanded its presence in health and wellness. With the 2014 launch of the Health app, Apple created a central hub for users to manage fitness, nutrition and medical data. The Apple Watch built on this foundation, adding heart rate monitoring, ECG capabilities, fall detection, blood oxygen measurement and more.
A Health+ service seems a logical next step. And one is allegedly on the way.
“Apple’s upcoming Health+ subscription will feature an artificial intelligence-powered assistant, allowing users to manage their well-being through personalized recommendations on nutrition, exercise and sleep,” Bloomberg reported Thursday. “That service is planned for launch in 2026.”
Apple is also shaking up leadership in its fitness, health and Apple Watch ranks, as Chief Executive Officer Jeff Williams prepares to retire this year.
Fitness and nutrition advice, but no actual AI doctor
Apple Watch wearers should already be familiar with getting exercise advice from their wrist. And Apple’s Fitness+ service already provides coaching. Health+ could join in, helping users make better lifestyle choices and improve their overall wellness.
As for food, getting nutrition advice from artificial intelligence is a very 2025 thing to do. Third-party apps like Cal AI already let users snap pictures of their meals and see a nutritional breakdown. It seems Apple might get into the same game with Health+.
The effort to revamp the Health app is reportedly called “Project Mulberry” within Apple. The idea is to use artificial intelligence to offer Apple users unique insights about their health and well-being.
“The enhanced Health app will continue gathering data from Apple devices like iPhone, Apple Watch, earbuds and compatible third-party products,” Cult of Mac reported in March. “But you can expect a crucial difference. The AI coach will analyze the information to provide personalized health-improvement recommendations.”
However, real questions remain about whether Apple would take the next step and have the service act like a doctor and provide medical diagnoses. AI excels at pattern recognition, so it can take a list of symptoms and recommend a treatment. But it’s not capable of noting what the patient isn’t saying about their medical problem, and that could completely throw off a diagnosis.
At most, the service might help patients decide whether they should see a doctor, as with the Apple Watch’s new hypertension alerts or sleep apnea detection.
Or maybe not. There’s the question of accountability. If Apple Health+ incorrectly tells someone they have a minor ailment, but they die the next day because they didn’t get urgently needed medical attention, Apple could be on the hook for a potentially massive lawsuit.
Ed Hardy has been writing full-time about tech for 25 years, and using it for much longer than that. His intro to Apple was a Macintosh Classic II (which he still has), but now he uses a 13-inch iPad Pro as his primary computer. He’s written for NotebookReview, TabletPCReview, and Brighthand, as well as other sites.
