is a senior reporter focusing on wearables, health tech, and more with 13 years of experience. Before coming to The Verge, she worked for Gizmodo and PC Magazine.
After nearly a decade of wearables testing, I’ve amassed a truly terrifying amount of health and fitness data. And while I enjoy poring over my daily data, there’s one part I’ve come to loathe: AI summaries.
Over the last two years, a deluge of AI-generated summaries has been sprinkled into every fitness, wellness, and wearable app. Strava introduced a feature called Athlete Intelligence, pitched as AI taking your raw workout data and relaying it to you in “plain English.” Whoop has Whoop Coach, an AI chatbot that gives you a “Daily Outlook” report summarizing the weather, your recent activity and recovery metrics, and workout suggestions. Oura added Oura Advisor, another chatbot that summarizes data and pulls out long-term trends. Even my bed greets me with summaries every morning of how its AI helped keep me asleep every night.
Each platform’s AI has its nuances, but the typical morning summary goes a bit like this:
Good morning! You slept 7 hours last night with a resting heart rate of 60 bpm. That’s in line with your weekly average, but your slightly elevated heart rate suggests you may not be fully recovered. If you feel tired, try going to bed earlier tonight. Health is all about balance!
That might seem helpful, but those summaries are usually placed next to a chart with the same data. It’s worse for workouts. Here’s one that Strava’s Athlete Intelligence generated for a recent run:
Intense run with high heart rate zones, pushing into anaerobic territory and logging a relative effort well above your typical range.
Thanks? I can ask Athlete Intelligence to “say more,” but it regurgitates my effort, heart rate zone, and pace metrics I can see in graphs in the workout summary. If you didn’t know anything about my athletic history or the circumstances surrounding this run, this summary might read as insightful. Here’s what the summary left out:
It was dangerous to triple my mileage in only my second run of the year, given the high humidity, 85-degree-plus weather, and my spotty workout history over the past two months compared to the six months before it. Strava has access to weather data and every workout I’ve done in the past five years.
I had to cut this run short because I fell and shredded my hand and knees. This is information Strava has access to, as I uploaded a gnarly picture in addition to text notes. After adding said notes, the updated summary only reflected that I cut the run short. My injury changed nothing about its insights, even though it’s the most important thing that happened during this run.
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