Fitness Trackers Are Using AI Now
I still have my original Fitbit somewhere. It was a small plastic clip that counted your steps, and honestly, at the time, that felt like the future. I wore it religiously for about a while, but it didn’t make tracking my fitness that much easier, so I stopped. It wasn't bad. It just didn't do enough to keep earning a place on my body.
I just picked up the new Fitbit Air from Google, and whatever expectations I carried from that original device needed a complete reset. There are other products like the Whoop and some rings that are similar.
The Watch Problem Nobody Talks About
Sure, smartwatches are genuinely impressive, but they have some flaws that limit how useful they can be. Most need daily charging. They are too cumbersome to wear while sleeping, which is when some valuable health data happens. You're not going to track your sleep stages wearing a watch that could bonk your face and run out of juice before midnight.
Fitbit took a different approach with the Air. There's no screen, no buttons. Just a small pebble you strap on and mostly forget about. The battery lasts a full week, and it charges so fast that five minutes plugged in covers most of the day. That changes everything about how much it can help.
Sleep Is Where Real Insight Lives
Wearing a watch to bed is uncomfortable. Most people who own a fitness watch don't do it. I know I didn't. The Fitbit Air is light enough that after a few nights you stop noticing it's there, and that means the data is there in the morning.
The Google Health app, which replaced the old Fitbit app in May, now breaks down your sleep stages, tracks your heart rate overnight, and flags patterns worth paying attention to. Getting a real picture of how you sleep, not just how long, is more useful than I expected. When the AI notices my sleep wasn’t restful enough it will adjust my recommended work out.
AI Finally Fixed Food Tracking
Here's the thing that stopped me from tracking food in every previous app I've tried: the database search. You'd eat a meal and then spend ten minutes hunting for each ingredient, guessing at portion sizes. Nobody sticks with that.
The Google Health AI coach handles it differently. You snap a photo of your plate, and Gemini identifies what's on it and logs the nutritional breakdown automatically. It's not perfect, but it's close enough to be useful, and more importantly, it's fast enough that you'll consistently do it.
A Coach That Actually Converses
The AI coach was the part I was most skeptical about, and it's the part that's surprised me most. After a workout you can open a conversation, describe how it went, and get a real back-and-forth response that factors in your sleep, your recovery score, and your recent training load. You can ask it to dial things back or push harder, and it adjusts. You can also leave it alone entirely and just use the basic tracking without any coaching at all. It meets you where you are.
Tech Tip:
The AI coach in Google Health gets significantly more useful once you complete the onboarding and give it a few weeks of real data. Resist the urge to judge it in the first few days. It's building a baseline. By week three, the workout and recovery recommendations start to feel genuinely personalized rather than generic.
Jim Hundley - AccentInspired.com - 727-346-6020
