Google just unveiled a 150-page blueprint on Health AI Agents

#1

Just starting to review this document… perhaps of interest to people…

Health is a fundamental pillar of human wellness, and the rapid advancements in large language models (LLMs) have driven the development of a new generation of health agents. However, the application of health agents to fulfill the diverse needs of individuals in daily health settings is underexplored. In this work, we aim to build a comprehensive personal health agent that is able to reason about multimodal personal health data from everyday consumer wellness devices and medical records and provide personalized health recommendations. To understand end-users’ needs when interacting with such an assistant, we conducted an in-depth analysis of web search and health forum queries, alongside qualitative insights from users and health experts gathered through a user-centered design process.

Based on these findings, we identified three major skill categories to fulfill consumer health needs, each of which is supported by a specialist sub-agent in our system:

(1) a data science agent that analyzes personal time-series wearable and medical record data, incorporating population-level statistics to provide contextualized numerical health insights,
(2) a health domain expert agent that integrates users’ health and contextual data to generate accurate, personalized insights based on health domain knowledge, and
(3) a health coach agent that synthesizes data insights, drives multi-turn user interactions and interactive goal setting, guiding users using a specified psychological strategy and tracking users’ progress.

Furthermore, we propose and develop Personal Health Agent (PHA), a multi-agent framework that enables dynamic, personalized interactions to address individual health needs. To evaluate each sub-agent and the multi-agent system, we conducted automated and human evaluations across 10 benchmark tasks, involving more than 7,000 annotations and 1,100 hours of effort from health experts and end-users. Our work represents the most comprehensive evaluation of a health agent to date and establishes a strong foundation towards the futuristic vision of a personal health agent accessible to everyone

healthagents

Full document:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.20148

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#2

It’s a start, I guess. Theoretically, this should be within the competence domain of AI platforms. It should be interesting and a valuable asset. In practice, just straight ChatGPT and Gemini have in my experience been just horrible, even with elaborate prompts and guidance. If you happen to know a lot about a given condition or drug, you quickly see just how terrible the results are. What shocks me is that studies which very directly address an issue are not found or ignored by these AI agents. Also more obscure stuff you can just forget. So, as an example, it’ll prattle on and on about a drug and its association with colon cancer, but all of that becomes irrelevant because it doesn’t account for SNP variants which make the drug not work in some people. Had I not known this, and not known my SNP, I would have taken the drug based on the AI agent research. But it was just a test to see how reliable and thorough AI is in this domain. Based on many such experiences, I wouldn’t dream of relying on AI.

Now they tell us that this time it’ll all be different and a wonderful world of reliable AI Health Agents will emerge. Fool me once. I’ll make sure to run some tests just to see how full of shit they are. I’m not optimistic. Maybe in 50 years.

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