The anatomy of a personal health agent

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Abstract
Large language models are enabling a new generation of health agents, yet their ability to address the diverse needs of individuals in everyday health settings remains underexplored 1,2 . Here we developed a comprehensive personal health agent that reasons over multimodal data from consumer wellness devices and medical records to provide personalized health support. Through analysis of web search and health forum queries, together with user-centred research involving end users and health experts, we identified four key user journeys: general health knowledge, personal data interpretation, wellness advice, and symptom assessment. These journeys informed three specialist sub-agents: (1) a data science agent that analyses longitudinal wearable and medical data, incorporating population-level statistics to contextualize numerical insights; (2) a health domain expert agent that integrates personal and contextual data with health knowledge to generate personalized insights; and (3) a health coach agent that synthesizes insights, supports multi-turn interaction and goal setting, applies specified psychological strategies and tracks progress. We integrated these capabilities in the personal health agent, an open-source multi-agent framework for dynamic, personalized health interactions. We evaluated the sub-agents and full system across 11 benchmark tasks using automated and human evaluation, with more than 7,000 annotations and 1,350 h of effort from health experts and end users. This represents the most comprehensive evaluation of a personal health agent thus far and provides a concrete foundation for improving access to high-quality personalized health support more broadly.

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