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Thrive AI Health is a new company funded by the OpenAI Startup Fund and Thrive Global. Its mission is to democratize access to expert-level health coaching through AI, thereby improving health outcomes and addressing health inequities.
The platform provides personalized health advice, catering to users who might not typically have access to such guidance. Whether it’s a single mother seeking quick meal ideas for her gluten-free child or an immunocompromised individual needing immediate advice, Thrive AI Health aims to make a difference.
DeCarlos Love, formerly at Google, serves as the CEO. His experience in wearables (including Fitbit) positions him well to lead this health-focused venture.
The Approach: “Atomic Habits”
Thrive AI Health focuses on five interconnected daily behaviors that significantly impact health: sleep, nutrition, fitness, stress management, and social connection.
By encouraging minor habit changes (e.g., a 10-minute walk after school pickup), the platform aims to enhance the lives of people with chronic conditions like heart disease.
While it doesn’t replace a doctor’s diagnosis, the AI health coach guides users toward healthier lifestyles.
Sam Altman and Arianna Huffington joined hands to build a personalized health and wellness platform: an AI health coach – Thrive AI Health, which is geared at improving health outcomes through artificial intelligence technology.
Thrive AI Health is about providing users with knowledge and insights that could make a difference, enabling most people who currently don’t have this access to personalized health advice. For example, supporting a single mother needing instant ideas for a quick meal for her gluten-free child or an immunocompromised individual who needs immediate advice between doctor’s appointments.
The CEO of Thrive AI Health is DeCarlos Love, who previously worked as a Google executive. He has experience in wearables since he used to work with Fitbit. Already the firm has set up joint research collaborations with leading institutions such as Stanford Medicine, the Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute at West Virginia University, and the Alice L. Walton School of Medicine. One of its strategic investors includes the Alice L. Walton Foundation.
The Approach
The AI health coach bases its work on an approach to “Atomic Habits” that encourages minor changes in sleep, nutrition, fitness, stress management, and social connection. By suggesting small changes, like a 10-minute walk after school pickup, the platform believes it will be able to enhance the lives of people with chronic conditions like heart disease.
Though the AI health coach does not supplant a doctor’s diagnosis, it guides users toward healthier lifestyles. Thrive AI Health looks to leverage this potential for the good of global health. New horizons of artificial intelligence now offer an opportunity to make behavior change more powerful and sustainable.
“Thrive AI Health Coach is the product to solve the limitations of current AI and LLM-based solutions by providing personalized, proactive, and data-driven coaching across five daily behaviors. In this fashion, it will improve health outcomes, reduce healthcare costs, and significantly impact chronic diseases globally,” said DeCarlos Love.
In a Time magazine op-ed, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Huffington said the bot will have access to “the best peer-reviewed science” as well as “the personal biometric, lab, and other medical data you’ve chosen to share with it.”
User Benefits and Concerns
Thrive AI Health’s aim is to deliver strong insights to those who wouldn’t typically have access but sharing health data with anyone besides a primary care physician might constitute a leak of the information. There is also the risk of the bot providing potentially dangerous, even deadly misinformation and that quality care could be diluted to quick and flawed responses minus the human touch.
This initiative comes on the back of widespread concerns over how AI chatbots and large language models use personal data in training their models. Thrive AI Health maintained that it would use only the data a user opts to share with the app. However, over time, the data will train the app and make it more personalized to a user’s behavior.
The improvement in the system of medicine with the help of AI would be excellent for people, granted that it works. Though a bot that tells you to get more sleep isn’t quite on the par with miracle AI cures, there has been some promising AI progress in health. For instance, a study concluded that a radiologist, aided by a specific tool using AI, can detect breast cancer from mammogram images just as accurately as two other radiologists.
Among the drugs designed by AI that are already in clinical trials, there is one to treat fibrosis, and MIT researchers used it in 2020 to discover an antibiotic capable of killing E. coli. The challenge for Altman and Huffington will be in building trust in a product handling some of your most private information while navigating the limits of Gen AI’s power.
