I let ChatGPT analyze a decade of my Apple Watch data, then I called my doctor
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Re: I let ChatGPT analyze a decade of my Apple Watch data, then I called my doctor
#2> Despite having access to my weight, blood pressure and cholesterol, ChatGPT based much of its negative assessment on an Apple Watch measurement known as VO2 max, the maximum amount of oxygen your body can consume during exercise. Apple says it collects an “estimate” of VO2 max, but the real thing requires a treadmill and a mask. Apple says its cardio fitness measures have been validated, but independent researchers have found those estimates can run low — by an average of 13 percent.
There's plenty of blame to go around for everyone, but at least for some of it (such as the above) I think the blame more rests on Apple for falsely representing the quality of their product (and TFA seems pretty clearly to be blasting OpenAI for this, not others like Apple).
What would you expect the behavior of the AI to be? Should it always assume bad data or potentially bad data? If so, that seems like it would defeat the point of having data at all as you could never draw any conclusions from it. Even disregarding statistical outliers, it's not at all clear what part of the data is "good" vs "unrealiable" especially when the company that collected that data claims that it's good data.
Re: I let ChatGPT analyze a decade of my Apple Watch data, then I called my doctor
#3> Despite having access to my weight, blood pressure and cholesterol, ChatGPT based much of its negative assessment on an Apple Watch measurement known as VO2 max, the maximum amount of oxygen your body can consume during exercise. Apple says it collects an “estimate” of VO2 max, but the real thing requires a treadmill and a mask. Apple says its cardio fitness measures have been validated, but independent researchers…
I have been sitting and waiting for the day these trackers get exposed as just another health fad that is optimized to deliver shareholder value and not serious enough for medical grade applications
Re: I let ChatGPT analyze a decade of my Apple Watch data, then I called my doctor
#4> Despite having access to my weight, blood pressure and cholesterol, ChatGPT based much of its negative assessment on an Apple Watch measurement known as VO2 max, the maximum amount of oxygen your body can consume during exercise. Apple says it collects an “estimate” of VO2 max, but the real thing requires a treadmill and a mask. Apple says its cardio fitness measures have been validated, but independent researchers…
> I think the blame more rests on Apple for falsely representing the quality of their product
There was plenty of other concerning stuff in that article. And from a quick read it wasn't suggested or implied the VO2 max issue was the deciding factor for the original F score the author received. The article did suggest many times over the ChatGPT is really not equipped for the task of health diagnosis.
> There was another problem I discovered over time: When I tried asking the same heart longevity-grade question again, suddenly my score went up to a C. I asked again and again, watching the score swing between an F and a B.
Re: I let ChatGPT analyze a decade of my Apple Watch data, then I called my doctor
#5The author is a healthy person but the computer program still gave him a failing grade of F. It is irresponsible for these companies to release broken tools that can cause so much fear in real people. They are treating serious medical advice like it is just a video game or a toy. Real users should not be the ones testing these dangerous products.
Re: I let ChatGPT analyze a decade of my Apple Watch data, then I called my doctor
#6We trained a foundation model specifically for wearable data:
https://www.empirical.health/blog/wearable-foundation-model-...
The basic idea was to adapt JEPA (Yann LeCun's Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture) to multivariate time series, in order to learn a latent space of human health from purely unlabeled data. Then, we tested the model using supervised fine tuning and evaluation on on a bunch of downstream tasks, such as predicting a diagnosis of hypertension (~87% accuracy). In theory, this model could be also aligned to the latent space of an LLM--similar to how CLIP aligns a vision model to an LLM.
IMO, this shows that accuracy in consumer health will require specialized models alongside standard LLMs.
Re: I let ChatGPT analyze a decade of my Apple Watch data, then I called my doctor
#7ChatGPT Health is a completely wreckless and dangerous product, they should be sued into oblivion for even naming it "health".
Re: I let ChatGPT analyze a decade of my Apple Watch data, then I called my doctor
#8> Despite having access to my weight, blood pressure and cholesterol, ChatGPT based much of its negative assessment on an Apple Watch measurement known as VO2 max, the maximum amount of oxygen your body can consume during exercise. Apple says it collects an “estimate” of VO2 max, but the real thing requires a treadmill and a mask. Apple says its cardio fitness measures have been validated, but independent researchers…
FWIW, Apple has published validation data showing the Apple Watch's estimate is within 1.2 ml/kg/min of a lab-measured Vo2Max.
Behind the scenes, it's using a pretty cool algorithm that combines deep learning with physiological ODEs: https://www.empirical.health/blog/how-apple-watch-cardio-fit...
Re: I let ChatGPT analyze a decade of my Apple Watch data, then I called my doctor
#9> Despite having access to my weight, blood pressure and cholesterol, ChatGPT based much of its negative assessment on an Apple Watch measurement known as VO2 max, the maximum amount of oxygen your body can consume during exercise. Apple says it collects an “estimate” of VO2 max, but the real thing requires a treadmill and a mask. Apple says its cardio fitness measures have been validated, but independent researchers…
I have been sitting and waiting for the day these trackers get exposed as just another health fad that is optimized to deliver shareholder value and not serious enough for medical grade applications
I don't see how they are considered a health fad, they're extremely useful and accurate enough. There are plenty of studies and real world data showing Garmin VO2Max readings being accurate to 1-2 points different to a real world test.
There is this constant debate about how accurately VO2max is measured and its highly dependent on actually doing exercise to determine your VO2max using your watch. But yes if you want a lab/medically precise measure you need to do it a test that measures your actual oxygen uptake.
Re: I let ChatGPT analyze a decade of my Apple Watch data, then I called my doctor
#10Original article can be read at https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/01/26/chatgpt....
Paywall-free version at https://archive.ph/k4Rxt