How will AI influence our Lifestyle Behaviours and Health and Wellbeing?
David Wortley
Director
IORMA Health & Wellness Technology Centre
February 2025
The former Head of the NHS, Sir Simon Stevens, recognised the challenges now faced by our Ageing Society when he predicted that public health services would become unsustainable and not fit for purpose unless lifestyle behaviours could be addressed “at an early stage as possible”
As Sir Simon Stevens indicated many years ago, preventative healthcare is critical to the future of public health but will AI have a positive or negative effect on public health and wellbeing and how could AI act as a catalyst to the widespread lifestyle behavioural changes necessary?
Wearable Technologies, Gamification and Behavioural Change (pre AI) First Generation Devices and Mobile Apps
The early wearable devices such as the Jawbone UP bracelet measured steps, sleep and diet and displayed results on a daily dashboard showing performance against targets such as 10,000 steps, 8 hours sleep and calories expended vs calorie intake. These 3 criteria relate to important pillars of lifestyle medicine such as exercise, sleep and nutrition. My lifestyle Medicine Journey started with the Jawbone UP in 2013 and the “gamified” approach of trying to achieve these simple targets motivated me to lose 21kg in 3 months. By today’s wearable technology standards, these 3 dashboard measurements lacked any health metrics and, noticeably, they avoided giving prescriptive health-related advice but instead provided web links to research papers on exercise, sleep and nutrition.
Devices like the Jawbone UP fitness tracker and the Withings Activite Pop smartwatch used gamification techniques to motivate behavioural change around these 3 metrics by providing targets such as 10,000 steps per day, 8 hours sleep and burning vs consuming calories. Different device manufacturers used similar techniques but presented progress dashboards in different ways and sometimes incorporating targets based on distance walked and used badges and levels.
All of these devices had little if any personalisation.
Second Generation Wearable Devices and Mobile Apps (pre AI)
The second generation wearable devices were primarily based on a smart watch design with biosensors incorporated, capable of measuring some basic clinical data such as heart rate as well as providing a more detailed breakdown of sleep quality. These new devices such as the Fitbit also recognised the importance of diet and nutrition and provided breakdowns of the nutritional value of food with suggested healthy recipes and Weight tracking from smart weigh scales.
Although the second generation devices were more sophisticated and better focused on the diet element of lifestyle behaviours, they required users to record more detailed information about food and also weight.
Like the first generation devices, they also used gamification techniques but lacked personalisation.
Third Generation Wearable Devices and Mobile Apps incorporating AI
Today, smart watches are being challenged by smart rings and both types of devices are starting to incorporate AI to not only provide more personalised insights into health, but also to adopt more sophisticated gamification techniques to influence lifestyle behaviours.
The Smart Ring that I use has a mobile app that is regularly updated with new features designed to not only give a better analysis and understanding of personal health through increasingly medical grade health data such as HRV and SPO2 but also now provides AI insights into my health trends and suggested areas for improvement.
The dashboards shown on the JC Ring app picture show the daily data with a health rating over the previous 24 hours and, on the right-hand side of the image, AI insights on the previous week and the previous month, highlighting where improvements have been made and where action may be needed. The use of indices for overall health and key indicators such as sleep quality and physical activity personalise the advice to the individual user and have the potential to influence lifestyle behaviours, especially if used in conjunction with diet and nutrition apps.
These smart ring and smart watch devices use increasingly advanced AI capabilities to provide detailed narratives designed to act as personal health coaches and the focus has shifted from incorporating diet advice (which requires significant user effort to record what is eaten) to exercise, quality of sleep and overall clinical health. The data collected on these devices has massive value both for the user and, potentially, public health services. The value of this data enables AI to deliver a highly personalised health coaching capability designed to create a sustainable influence on lifestyle behaviours and enhance personal health management abilities.
Although smart rings and watches are a rapidly growing sector, their use at present seems largely concentrated amongst either the health conscious or individuals with specific health problems that these devices can help manage. Those in most need of lifestyle behavioural change are probably the most difficult to encourage to use these devices, even though there are powerful arguments both on an individual basis and a health population basis where more comprehensive and up to data health data would be invaluable for planning health services and delivering more appropriate treatment because of the availability of up to date health metrics.
AI Addressing the Challenge of the Ageing Society with Supporting Technologies
Whilst today’s AI driven wearable devices have massive potential for supporting preventative healthcare and improving our understanding of our health and how to better manage it, AI alone will not contribute to behavioural change at scale with the human factor and solutions based on simple gamification concepts that bring people together to track a health metric that is valid and understandable.
The Longevity Salon and Nutrition Club approaches being trialled in the Milton Keynes area hold great promise by bringing people together to leverage exercise and diet to “Age Younger”. The dashboard shown above gives an indication of how the Longevity salon supplements the data from wearables and other consumer biosensing technologies such as smart scales/body analysers to help members achieve healthy ageing by reducing their bioage. In conjunction with a Nutrition Club, it also helps to address the mental health and social connections elements of lifestyle medicine.
The Negative Impact of AI on Health and Wellbeing
In 2012, I wrote a book on how our relationship with technology has changed over the period of my lifetime from a situation where technology needed be harnessed and controlled by human skills and experience in the 1950s to today where AI is being used to harness and control human skills and experience.
Whilst from the examples I have shown, there is great potential for AI to have a positive influence on our lifestyle behaviours, its primary use and development strategy has a more commercial purpose relating to what we give our attention to, what we purchase, how we spend our time and what our opinions are. For regular users of smartphones and the internet, AI knows us better than we know ourselves and is increasingly good at shaping our daily behaviours and, in a real sense, controlling our actions. Especially for young people, this phenomenon plays a part in some of their physical and mental health challenges such as obesity, anxiety and anorexia.
If the true potential of AI is to be harnessed for the good of public health and sustainable health services, strategic policy actions are needed to mitigate against these negative effects whilst encouraging Ais use for better preventative healthcare.
Disclaimer
The reviews of the products and services mentioned in this article are based on my personal experience as a user. They are not intended to promote or endorse specific products or services.