Google working on AI feature for Fitbit

Alphabet Inc.’s Google announced a slew of initiatives to deploy its artificial intelligence models in the health-care industry, including a tool that will help Fitbit users glean insights from their wearable devices and a partnership to improve screenings for cancer and disease in India.

At its annual health event in New York City, the company said Tuesday that teams at Google Research and Fitbit, which it owns, were developing a new AI feature that will draw data from the wristbands to coach users on their personal health. Powered by Google’s most advanced AI model, Gemini, the tool could, for example, assess how workouts affect the quality of a person’s sleep.

The tech giant also said it will work with Apollo Radiology International to deliver AI-powered screenings for tuberculosis, lung cancer and breast cancer in India. Once Apollo has secured regulatory approval, the effort will deliver 3 million free scans over the next 10 years, Google said. The company said it’s also improving health information in Google search and YouTube, its video site.

Google has been trying to revolutionize health care for years, with varied success. It announced plans to buy Fitbit in 2019, but the deal came under heavy antitrust scrutiny amid concerns about what Google would do with the vast user data it collected. Last year, Google unveiled Med-PaLM, an AI model that has capably fielded medical questions. The latest initiatives are part of Google’s pledge to ensure high quality health information is being delivered across all its products used by consumers and companies, Karen DeSalvo, Google’s chief health officer, said.

Google has been striving to integrate its AI work, including its large language models, into medical research. Large language models are massive systems that ingest enormous volumes of digital text and use that material to train software that predicts and generates content when given a prompt or query.

On Tuesday, Google said it had begun to explore fine-tuning its Gemini AI model for medical applications.