After revolutionizing the IT industries, music, telephone and game through a quarter of a century of dazzling innovation, Apple turns its attention to the much more important health sector. And AI is a large part of the company's plan.
In the latest edition of his power on the newsletter, Bloomberg Mark Gurman's journalist makes a deep dive in a major project in Cupertino which is known internally by the code name “Mulberry”. Intended to culminate in another subscription service, probably marked as Health +, this project will see the health application completely overhauled and will receive a new “Health Coach” feature supplied by AI.
The AI element, writes Gurman, “reproduce – at least to a certain extent – a real doctor”, which is likely to trigger alarms with those who fought with Apple Intelligence. The company's AI system has been rekindled by problems since its launch last year, and although such teeth pains are not disastrous when a functionality tries to summarize the application notifications, the prospect of a refreshment of the AI giving unreliable health advice is deeply disturbing.
If you think you can soon talk to an AI doctor on your iPhone, however, it may not be quite how the service takes place. The idea is that the Health application collects data from your iPhone, Apple Watch and any other Apple or compatible product capable of monitoring health information, just like for the moment. The difference is that an AI coach will interpret this information to provide health advice adapted to your body, your circumstances and the needs. This AI coach is currently trained using “data from doctors who [Apple] A on the staff, ”reports Gurman. Hopefully the training is more in -depth than the regime that Genmoji followed.
You can see the faces of doctors on the screen, but they will be real flesh and blood doctors rather than the doctors generated by AI. Apple recruits health professionals, “including sleeping, nutrition, physiotherapy, mental health and cardiology” experts to make a series of videos that will serve as explanators. If health decides, depending on your data, that you must make changes to your diet, for example, you could show yourself a video on food tracking or obtaining more fresh vegetables.
One of the medical recruits, someone that Gurman describes as a “great personality of the doctor” will be chosen to be the face of the service and his de facto host. Which has the meaning from a marketing and interactivity point of view. But we hope that Apple's real priorities are on the medical side of things rather than presentation.
The project should materialize within the framework of iOS 19.4 software in the spring or summer 2026. Apple should unveil iOS 19 during its Keynote WWDC on June 9, we can therefore know more about the functionality soon.
