It’s common to have some sort of health tracker on your phone, wrist — or even around your finger. But is recording all activity in our diet and exercise actually necessary? And can knowing ALL our health data ever be harmful?

On this episode of On Nutrition, we talk with dietitian and nutritionist Ro Huntriss about our obsession with our own metrics, the ever-evolving world of AI, and how to properly engage with healthcare technology.

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Listen to The truth behind ‘10,000 steps a day’: Using health tech to improve your wellbeing

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Tara Schmidt: This is “On Nutrition,” a podcast from Mayo Clinic where we dig into the latest nutrition trends and research to help you understand what’s health and what’s hype. I’m Tara Schmidt, a registered dietician with Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. This episode, “Technology.”

Technology is changing faster than many of us can keep up with, and that includes healthcare technology. Whether your phone counts your steps, an app catalogs your calories, or your watch monitors your sleep. We have access to more personalized data about our bodies than ever before, but is more data actually helping us? And what about AI? When is it okay to talk to a computer rather than a dietician or doctor?

This episode’s guest, Ro Huntriss, has a front row seat to changes in health technology. Ro is a London-based consultant, dietician, and nutritionist, and currently serves as a Chief Nutrition officer for the Simple app, a weight loss and health coaching app that has millions of users worldwide. She’s here to help us understand how to pull apart the data and harness the benefits of today’s healthcare technology. Hi Ro. Thanks so much for being with me here today. I appreciate your time.

Ro Huntriss: Oh, it’s really, really great to be here with you, and I’m very much looking forward to our discussion today.

Tara Schmidt: Same. When I think back on how healthcare technology has changed in just our lifetimes, it’s wild. I remember telling patients if you work with us, you’ll get a pedometer. It was a square pedometer that they like cooked on their jeans.

Ro Huntriss: Similarly, in the U.K., we used to give away these little pedometers that people used to clip onto their jeans, and look where we are now.

Tara Schmidt: When we look at the market of health apps and devices, it seems like the sector has been absolutely booming over the last few years. We’ve got watches and rings and Fitbits! You have been working in the Healthtech space for a while now. How have you seen this market change over time?

Ro Huntriss: Think the really interesting thing now is that it just appears to be so integrated into society. It’s just come on kind of leaps and bounds over the years. And, now approximately one in five adult Americans have a wearable device or something similar. And they’re just so easily recognizable now, you know, if somebody’s walking down the street with an Aura Ring, you know it’s an Aura Ring.

If somebody’s got an Apple Watch on, you know it’s an Apple Watch. And the devices have just got so much more sophisticated. What started so fancy, and what started off, you know, very much as Something that counted your steps now it can monitor elements of heart health.

Devices can track glucose levels, monitor our sleep — the list goes on and on. It’s wild in a way, to see how far it’s advanced, and I think this is just the beginning. I really do feel that there’s a lot more to come.

Tara Schmidt: When we use the phrase “health technology,” what does that mean to you? What does it encompass?

Ro Huntriss: It’s any technology, in essence, that is associated with the improvement of health. When many people think of healthtech, we might think of apps or wearable devices, but actually it spans much further than that — even things like telemedicine. That’s when you have a video call with your doctor or your dietitian. The softwares that enables that, they’re health technologies. And AI, we’re hearing AI all over the place at the moment, but this can be utilized in health in many ways.

Health technologies may include AI coaching. That we’re seeing more of now, and even things like AI diagnostics imagery. Beyond that, we see the use of robotics and surgery. All of these kinds of things are health technologies.

Tara Schmidt: It’s amazing, right? We can monitor patients from miles and miles away. If I have to go to the doctor, I’m like, ‘Ugh, can’t you do this from the computer?’ I have to go get a pap smear.

Ro Huntriss: I know. And don’t get me wrong, there is still very much a place for in-person appointments. A lot of people still do like them. But actually, the online appointments now are often really favorable because it means you don’t have to take time off work to go to them. You can do it on your lunch break. It’s really changed how healthcare works and to be honest, I think it makes things easy on both sides, both for the clinician, but also for the patient as well.

Tara Schmidt: You and I are both dietitians. Let’s talk specifically about nutrition apps and fitness trackers. How widespread do you see the use of these and why do you think people invest in them?

Ro Huntriss: It is incredibly widespread. If we look just to 2023, there were over 300 million health app users in the world, which is just mental. If we’re looking at America specifically, around 50 percent of 18 to 34 year olds used a health app in 2023. If we actually look at the age group of 65 and above, 30 percent of that group use health apps.

People have these preconceptions older adults may not want to use a health app, but actually, and we see at the Simple app where I work, the majority of our user base is probably age 50 and above.

Even with wearable devices — if we go back to 2015, it was one in 10. If we go back to 2010, then it was less than one in 20 people. It is growing and growing and growing. But in terms of why people want these technologies? A lot of people are more health aware, and they’re aware of the positive impact that diet and lifestyle changes can have on their health. And I don’t know about you, but I think that we as humans are really interested in ourselves. And so when something can tell us something about ourselves, It’s interesting to us.

Why more people are using it is around accessibility. With so many people having access to a smartphone, there’s so many apps there that are free. If people are wanting to improve their health and wellness, then why not access the support that is out there?

Tara Schmidt: One of the benefits I always tell my members and my patients is all you have to use this for is self-awareness. You don’t have to associate guilt with it. You don’t have to make life altering changes. But if you can use this tech to learn more about yourself, learn more about your habits, then you can go and make the change.

It doesn’t have to be someone else in your life, healthcare provider or not, telling you what to do.

Ro Huntriss: If we look at traditional healthcare models, it is very much the patient goes to the healthcare provider, the healthcare provider tells them what to do. They go away and do it.

Tara Schmidt: Or not.

Ro Huntriss: Correct. But with these technologies, it cuts out that step. There is absolutely still a place where healthcare professionals and medical intervention is required. But there are opportunities where we might be able to do ourselves and actually see some great improvements.

Tara Schmidt: Then ideally save those one-on-one interactions with healthcare professionals for what they’re needed for — a money saving, time saving, effort saving on all parts.

Ro Huntriss: Absolutely.

Tara Schmidt: But do we need it all? Do we need to know our sleep cycles, our heart rate — if there’s not a diagnosis related to your safety and such? Is it necessary or is it a little overkill sometimes?

Ro Huntriss: With health technologies, like wearable devices, for example, we don’t need them. They’re not essential to health improvement. But what we do find is that they can improve the health and well-being of many people. It is very, very individual as to who may benefit. It’s important that we as individuals take responsibility and if we are actually using it, checking in. Is this benefiting me or not?

On the topic of sleep, sleep is a funny one. I go to bed at 10, wake up at six. In my mind, I’ve had eight hours of sleep, feel great, ready to tackle the day ahead. If I had a wearable device that told me my sleep, every following morning, the reality is that I probably didn’t fall asleep at 10, and I might have woken up a few times in the night.

It may have been that I had six and a half or seven hours of sleep. I feel for me, that if I knew that, I may go into my next day with the mindset that I might not be at peak performance today. It may then influence my day. But my perception of that is for me, it might not be helpful. However, some people find it super helpful. Then they understand that, “Oh, I’ve got four hours of sleep debt. I need to get an early night tonight.”

I think you need to assess, is it going to be useful for you or is it going to be a hindrance? Then you can make that decision for, for

Tara Schmidt: I was talking to someone yesterday and I said, if you hadn’t weighed yourself this morning, how would you have felt yesterday would have gone?

I felt great about my nutrition and my exercise yesterday, but then I weighed myself this morning. I didn’t see what I expected or wanted to see, and now I feel bad, I feel guilty, I feel like yesterday was crap. Now you have a completely different mindset. That’s not a mindset that I want anyone to have.

Ro Huntriss: No, and again, I think it’s going into this with a responsible mindset and looking out for yourself. Being kind to yourself and reasonable with yourself in the interpretation of what these figures tell you. In terms of apps, we develop and we build apps. That’s part of our responsibility as well. How do we feed this data back? Being supportive, being empathetic, having that right tone of voice that is going to support their progress and not hinder it.

Tara Schmidt: Absolutely.

Healthcare technology is booming. Telemedicine appointments have saved providers and patients, tons of money and time. The rise of wearable devices, trackers, and health and fitness apps has made personalized health information and guidance more accessible than ever.

Let’s face it, we like to learn about ourselves and these technologies do that for us. I wanna know if I took more steps than yesterday, and that can help us build more self-awareness of our habits. But it’s also important to think about how having more data will influence you.

Will it motivate you to take a walk after dinner to hit your goal, or will you go to bed feeling bad about not getting enough steps in? In other words, we want our data to influence our actions, but not negatively impact our feelings. There’s so many things you can measure, maybe even too many things for one person to wrap their head around. Let’s talk about how to make sense of these numbers.

Step counters or pedometers are where this all started, especially this number we hear all the time — 10,000 steps. Do we know where that number came from?

Ro Huntriss: Where this 10,000 steps came from, basically it was a marketing campaign many years ago, back in the sixties for a pedometer. It all came out of Japan and the name of this pedometer in Japanese was the equivalent of 10,000 steps.

There was no study, no research to say, this is the magic amount of steps to achieve optimal health. But they thought, you know what, 10,000 is a pretty nice number, and also, 10,000 in Japanese, in terms of what that looks like to be spelled out, kind of looks like a walking man.

They pulled all of these ideas with zero scientific backing together and said 10,000 steps. And you know what? It’s stuck. I remember the first time that I really questioned it was I went on what I felt was a really reasonable walk. I felt like I’d been walking for ages. Then I got home and my phone told me that I’d done 8,000 steps. I was furious.

Tara Schmidt: This is BS. There are health guidelines where doing 30 minutes of activity, five times a week  and aiming for that 150 minutes of activity. I was like, I feel like I’ve done more than that today, and I still haven’t reached my 10,000 steps. That is not a realistic target for everybody and neither does it need to be.

Ro Huntriss: If your average is around 4,000 and you want to improve your activity, increase it, maybe aim for six and then think, “Does six work for me?” Then you get there and you’re like, “Okay, I’m pretty happy with this.” I can fit it in my schedule. It might be that 6,000 is a good thing for you to aim for, or you might feel, actually, I want to challenge myself a little bit further and push it up to eight. But there doesn’t need to be any hard or fast rules with this. It is just what works best for you.

Tara Schmidt: I completely agree. When I work in the hospital, I would get 12,000 steps just in my work day. And that’s great. That’s a lot of non exercise activity, as we call it. I wasn’t sitting at a desk, but I also wasn’t exercising. It didn’t mean that at the end of the day, I was successful with 12,000 steps and I don’t have to do strength training or cardio.

My heart wasn’t challenged, my muscles weren’t challenged, I just had a really busy day of walking around the hospital. I always will ask the people that I’m working with, what’s your baseline? We’re gonna go from there. If you’re a construction worker and you get 20,000 steps, that’s cool, but we still have to do something that’s challenging.

Maybe not that day, maybe on the weekend, but it’s so individualized that I know people get really stuck on this 10,000 number. I’m like, is that a thing? I also find people get really caught up in the details. They’re like, “Okay, so I walked on a treadmill for two miles, but the treadmill said two miles and my smartwatch said one. Which one is true? And I’m like, can we just celebrate the fact that you walked two miles on a treadmill and not call the company about which one is more accurate?

Then we also have the cheaters who are swinging their arms around. I’m like, what’s that for? No one’s watching how many steps you get via your cheater arm movements. I don’t know, do you feel like there’s a difference in accuracy and maybe more importantly, does it matter?

Ro Huntriss: We’ve got a bit of a hierarchy, really. We’ve got things like self-reporting. Then we’ve got wearable devices, things that are attached to us, and then we’ve got things like our phone. If we take steps, as an example, really, wearable devices and things that you have on you all the time are going to be the most accurate.

But these can be overestimated or underestimated because it’s linked to your movement. As you say, if your arms are incredibly agile, then your steps —

Tara Schmidt: You’re like a big talker, right, where it’s a lot of hand movements — 

Ro Huntriss: But conversely, if you’re walking your stroller, then it may be that steps aren’t picked up quite as much. They’re likely to be picked up pretty accurately, but again, these are the kind of things that could have an influence on accuracy.

There is a disparity between smart watches and then your phone, for example. Your phone isn’t quite as sensitive to what a smart would be, but Also, if you’re going to the bathroom, or you are taking the trash out, you don’t have your phone with you all the time that you’ve done.

Tara Schmidt: Pockets, right?

Ro Huntriss: Exactly. But really, does it matter? Wearable devices are as accurate as they need to be because really those fine details are just not important.

Tara Schmidt: The other example I’ve written about this for Mayo Clinic Press is I have a little treadmill, and then I stand and I walk on it and I type, or I’m in a meeting and my watch is like, are you still exercising? My legs are still moving. My arms aren’t swinging because I’m typing. It really is discouraging to me because I don’t get the credit that I want. It’s all a mental game.

Ro Huntriss: You know what? We kind of want that praise. Whether it’s a person or a machine, we want it to tell us, well done.

Tara Schmidt: We know that there is some efficacy, because we saw a review from the British Journal of Sports Medicine that found that participants in a 12-week exercise program who wore fitness trackers lost more weight than the ones who didn’t wear one. People can identify what they’re going to be motivated by, and I would say that most people — we all know someone in our lives who paces their living room to get to their 10,000 steps or if they’re at 9,500 at the end of the day, they’re like “I’m getting that number.”

Let’s talk about the benefits of food tracking or tracking your intake.

Ro Huntriss: I agree with your point before in terms of it just helps with awareness. We eat throughout the day, throughout the week. Naturally, sometimes we just don’t think about it. Tracking really helps to bring awareness of your eating behaviors. Even if somebody doesn’t track something, but they’re supposed to be tracking, they’re more aware that they’ve had it, so

Tara Schmidt: Exactly. Yep.

Ro Huntriss: It helps with that. But also with apps, once you’ve tracked, you can get immediate feedback on that. Apps can interpret what you’ve had and then give you guidance, it could be well done. This meal was amazing. Cool. Carry on. Or this is something that you might want to consider for your next meal. If people have a particular health goal, food tracking can help to keep people focused; it can help to keep them motivated — and interestingly from our data, we do find that those who track their food more frequently see greater weight loss.

Tara Schmidt: Absolutely. Same. I would say even or more so if they’re honest about it, right? Even if you’re going over your goal of calories or food servings, as long as you’re being truthful about it, you have that greater self-awareness and can do something different about it the next day, or you have greater self-awareness and you eat less of it. You share it with someone or you order something new or order something new next time. We want it just to be increasing your knowledge.

Another one we see is a CGM. Let’s talk about continuous glucose monitors. How do these work? Do you find them to be helpful in influencing behaviors?

Ro Huntriss: When I worked clinically as a dietitian earlier on in my career, it was within diabetes. People historically needed to check their blood glucose levels and they would do them via multiple finger pricks per day. So literally needing to draw blood, put that blood on a monitor, then get your results.

CGMs or continuous glucose monitors came in and this is where people wear a sensor. It’s often on the arm, sometimes on the abdomen. And basically the sensor goes beneath the skin into the, it’s only tiny, but it goes into the interstitial fluid.

Basically, it is able to assess the levels of glucose there, which gives an indication as to the levels of glucose in the blood. just continually measures it. And then there’s often an app associated, so people can just look at their phone, at any time of day, and they can see what their blood glucose level is.

Now, this is proving very, very popular for people with diabetes. And then people without diabetes got wind of this and they were like can I have a go,

Tara Schmidt: I want that.

Ro Huntriss: Now what we see is people who are perfectly healthy having CGMs to understand what is happening to their blood glucose. And there’s always such a debate around this. Like, what’s the point? Is it beneficial for health? And again, I think it’s a really personal thing. Certainly for people without diabetes, it is not essential. We know

Tara Schmidt: I agree.

Ro Huntriss: Some people feel that so basically they utilize it for they consume food, and then they look at the impact of their blood glucose and look for, we hear this term all the time now, glucose spikes. What’s giving me a glucose spike? But the effect of glucose rise in blood following a meal — that’s only one interesting thing about the effects of one’s diet. It can be useful if somebody has a high carbohydrate diet, or a high sugar intake because they can then make adjustments to that, and then great, but also, on the flip side, You could eat butter all day,

Tara Schmidt: Bro, I was just going to say you could eat a stick of butter.

Ro Huntriss: me and you are

Tara Schmidt: I know.

Ro Huntriss: Then literally, your blood glucose levels would be perfect. But like, would your cholesterol be perfect? Probably not. So, we really need to consider so much more than just blood glucose.

Tara Schmidt: I remind people also that if your pancreas is functioning well, it’s okay to have rises or quote spikes in your blood sugar. The important thing is how often and how long of a range or what your A1C is.?

I don’t love it when people freak out about eating a super healthy whole grain carbohydrate and their blood sugar rising. I’m like, yes, yes, it did. And I’m assuming it came back down because you do not have diabetes or prediabetes. That’s okay. I don’t want there to be fear around any rise in blood sugar. That just happens.

Ro Huntriss: An interesting part of this discussion is what are some of the benefits that people find from using CGMs for people who don’t have diabetes and the evidence really is emerging. For some people it can support with weight management. The main reason is that it’s that awareness. When you’re tracking something you’re really paying attention to what you’re eating and then the effects of that on your body. So For some people it can have a positive impact on weight management.

It just boils down to, it is a personal choice. These things cost money, they’re not cheap. Generally these sensors are for a couple of weeks and then you need to do another one. So, do people want to do these endlessly? If you’re happy and willing to buy them and you’re seeing benefits, then, by all means, it’s an option, but it’s not essential.

Tara Schmidt: We could always counsel you on other things that you could track in an app potentially for free or just by looking at labels, right? We could have you track your added sugar intake and how many grams of added sugar are you having or track your total carbohydrate intake per meal, right? How do we find this balance between we’re using the tech to educate us, to motivate us versus like information overload? What have you seen in your practice or your work that we should look out for?

Ro Huntriss: In my clinical practice, it’s been actually largely positive and people have gone into it with a good mindset, and they’ve actually been really quite motivated by it. However, I worked less with people with eating disorders and these kinds of tools that require tracking and that show you a lot of data are just not really a good fit for a group like that. We need to do a bit of a risk assessment in terms of who these are likely to be beneficial for.

For us to actually just sit and reflect. Is this good for me? Is this beneficial for me? And if it’s not, even if you’ve invested money into it, the best thing is to just stop and focus on something that’s a gentler approach that maybe has less of a focus on numbers and more on a focus of how you’re feeling.

There’s many different ways that we can approach health improvement. Mm

Tara Schmidt: Yeah, I think if you are recognizing that your social life is being impacted, your mood is being impacted, your self worth or feelings of self worth are being impacted, that those would be some examples of this may have become unhealthy. for you. And if you still want to do something, maybe it’s something with less data.

Identifying this balance between how it makes me feel and how does it change my habits?

Tara Schmidt: I hate to break it to you, but 10,000 steps is a mostly made up number. Sure, walking that many steps is probably good for you, but you should consider what your baseline is and whether you’re challenging yourself rather than picking a one size fits all goal. Speaking of numbers , you don’t need to obsess over accuracy, even if it’s a little unsatisfying not to get your credit for every single step.

In fact, the active tracking itself, even if you’re not hitting your goals, can still have benefits by helping build that self-awareness. And while continuous glucose monitors are a game changer for people with diabetes, it’s unclear how helpful they are for non-diabetic folks

Blood sugar is only one way to interpret how food affects you. And it’s normal for healthy people to have blood sugar spikes even after a nutritious meal. But tracking health data isn’t for everyone. If you have a history of disordered eating or if tracking is detrimental to your social life, mood or self-esteem, it’s worth taking a step back to ask yourself if it’s the best option for you.

But as we started to discuss, the most important thing is finding balance. So let’s dig into how we can keep a level head especially in the ever evolving world of ai.

Tara Schmidt: Do you have any advice for how people can take this gentle or balanced approach? How do we use tech to keep an eye on our holistic health, but not necessarily just what I’m eating and how many steps a day I’m getting?

Ro Huntriss: Many apps initially focused on one area. So one app may have been a nutrition app. One app may have been a fitness app. One app is around sleep, etc. But actually what we are seeing more of now is integration.

We can’t just focus on one area of health and then neglect the rest. And it’s not that we need to be 10 out of 10 and performing spectacularly at everything. We need to still be realistic and reasonable with ourselves. But yeah, it’s great actually to see these apps that do have a focus on not just nutrition, but activity, sleep, stress, general wellness and mood, and we’re starting to see more and more of this now, which I think is a really positive thing.

Tara Schmidt: Sometimes, I will encourage just focusing on one of those things at a time, right? So I’m going to say one of the downfalls of the Mayo Clinic diet app is that our habit tracker has 15 different habits.

From nutrition to exercise to mindful eating, et cetera. They’re all great, but 15 can overwhelm people. I really encourage people to just slowly build upon what they’re doing.

If you want to focus on mindful eating first and do that for however long you want to, please do. If you want to focus on your sleep, I’ve had so many patients focus on sleep before they focus on nutrition with me. I’m not a sleep medicine person, I’m a dietician, but I recognized in our conversation how essential better sleep for them is and how it is impacting their nutrition.

Don’t feel like you have to tackle all the puzzle pieces at once. If I try to go to bed at eight and get my exercise in, and I’m going to track my food — I’m just going to fail. I’m a type-A person and that’s going to make me feel really bad about myself.

Ro Huntriss: I totally agree and I think it’s a really, really nice way to approach it. If you’re focusing on sleep and this is your habit that you’re focusing on, then you can give it your attention. You can invest in it. Then your habits can develop.

Tara Schmidt: You’re putting in the effort to knock that one thing out or become really confident in that. And when you’ve got it down, now we can pick up a new one.

Ro Huntriss: Absolutely.

Tara Schmidt: You are the Chief Nutrition Officer of The Simple App, which offers a lot of tools around healthy eating, including an AI coach. Tell me some of the benefits you’ve seen with your users and them working with an AI coach versus, of course, you’ve seen patients. As a human professional.

Ro Huntriss: When we started out at Simple App, it was very much a self-monitoring platform. People were logging the food that they consume, the activity that they did, the drinks that they were consuming, weight, and like the times at which they were eating. We had always thought about the idea of coaching and about the idea of human coaching and bringing that into the app. Obviously, technology evolved once again, and we launched our AI coach around about 18 months ago now, and it’s one of our most popular features.

Our users love it so much. But I guess the benefits of it are that if you’ve got a question about your journey, you have instant access. Obviously going to see a human coach like a dietitian, for example, is amazing. Not everybody has access and they certainly don’t at 11 o’clock at night.

In terms of scalability. We have a lot of users, we’ve had like 17 million downloads to date. We just don’t have the human coaches to be able to support such a large group of people. But this one AI coach can serve millions of people on a daily basis.

Tara Schmidt: Dieticians are the one building the algorithms, right? You know what the answer would be because you wrote the answer that.

Ro Huntriss: We’ve got a team of dietitians and doctors that have helped to shape and build our coach. That is called AVO. We’re very careful in terms of not just the scientific accuracy and the safety, but also the tone of voice. The aim is to be really supportive, empathetic, and understanding. If somebody had a day where their diet choices weren’t that great, we’re not going to be there to tell somebody off, we’re going to be there to understand and then help on to the next stage. Because people often, if they’ve had a bad day or a bad week, right, I’m throwing in the towel.

If you’ve got someone or something there to help you to stay on track, then it can be very, very beneficial.

Tara Schmidt: Yeah, I worked on a telemedicine platform that was doing a texting functionality with patients when they were on a GLP-1 medication, and the tech people had written out what their assumed answers would be — like, you have lost weight, you have gained weight, are you nauseous? I was there to humanize it and be like, “I would never say that to a patient.” They’d say “Well, it’s the app,” and I’m like, “No, no, like, we’re going to talk to these people like they’re people.”

They know they’re talking to AI. I know they’re talking to AI, but I want them to feel like they’re talking to me. “Change it up, boys,” is what I said. When do you feel like it’s time for someone to see a dietitian? AI is great for pretty basic functionality and even some advanced functionality, but when would you encourage one of your users to seek out a dietitian?

Ro Huntriss: This is one of the things that we train AVO to be able to respond to. We do not aim to prevent, treat, manage any medical conditions. If somebody starts to speak to AVO about the management of their diabetes, or their heart disease, or their kidney disease, Avvo will signpost them, “This is a conversation that you should be having with your medical team, your healthcare provider, please go and do so.”

There are some more complex cases of obesity. We can help with those basic functionalities, like habit building, but when things do get a bit more complex, say if there’s comorbidities involved and people may have issues in terms of mental health or other things like that, this is where we need healthcare professionals to really to be delivering the intervention.

Tara Schmidt: Completely agree. Any misconceptions related to Healthtech that you can think of?

Ro Huntriss: What I sometimes fear, and sometimes it can come from healthcare professionals as well, like the fear of, is this the right solution? As with all things in terms of weight management, there isn’t a one-size that fits all, but actually it can be something that is really, really effective and it can be an adjunct to other ways in which people manage their health.

To be honest, I think in terms of apps and the ability of apps, there’s quite a lot of data now to show the effectiveness of apps compared to in-person care. It’s just as good as seeing a dietitian in-clinic. There are studies, and I think you guys might have done one.

Tara Schmidt: I was going to say, we actually published a paper on people doing our program via our app and our online platform versus doing it in-person and then via phone call. The people who did the online platform were much more successful. That’s not to bash our in-person program. My feeling and my clinical opinion is that the accessibility and the frequency of using the app and the platform was significantly higher than it was for a monthly phone call after a few in-person days at the clinic. It was our program versus our program. We can speak ill or well of it in whatever context we want.

Ro Huntriss: I worked at another digital healthcare provider before I worked at the Simple app and we did research. It was dietitian in-person versus dietitian, but supporting people through an app, and the results were comparable. There’s actually sufficient data out there to prove the effectiveness of weight-loss interventions through an app.

To be honest, that’s a really, really good thing because as we said, we need something that’s scalable in terms of the number of people that do need support with weight management. Human coaches, we just don’t have the capacity to do it. Healthcare professionals don’t need to be fearful of this technology. It’s more working with it as opposed to against it.

Tara Schmidt: What should consumers look for? How can we make sure that the tech is going to be working for us?

Ro Huntriss: People need to ask themselves, what are they trying to achieve? Because if they want to increase their physical activity levels, then potentially a wearable device could be something that’s useful for them. If it’s actually nutrition that they’re wanting to improve, then perhaps an app around nutrition is going to be more useful than a wearable device.

Also thinking about, “What are known barriers for me?” If counting calories is triggering or it’s just too arduous, then find a solution that doesn’t count calories and there are plenty out there. Because really the key thing in terms of any weight management or health intervention, the thing that’s going to make it successful is adherence. What is it that you are able to stick to? And then go for that.

Tara Schmidt: I will always ask people when they ask me these questions, “What’s going to be different for you knowing this data? Are you going to do something different with your lifestyle?” And if the answer is yes, then great. Collect all the data you want. But if you’re not going to do anything about it, then it was probably a waste of, potentially, money — time, effort, etc.

Ro Huntriss: Yeah.

Tara Schmidt: As someone who works in the Healthtech space, what do you think the future is? What can we expect to see moving forward? Are we going to have rings and bracelets and all of the things?

Ro Huntriss: Well, I mean, talking about jewelry at the conference that we connected at, there were actually wearable earrings.

Tara Schmidt: Were they cute?

Ro Huntriss: Yeah, and what this particular company does, they have the health data, such as sleep and heart rate and other things like that — but they actually interpret it as per the stage of a woman’s cycle.

Tara Schmidt: They can tell that by your ears?

Ro Huntriss: They can tell in terms of temperature and things like that. Say your sleep, for example, you can hypothesize that your sleep may be better at different parts of your cycle. I feel that the development of AI is probably going to reach a place beyond our imaginations, because even with the presence of AI coaches and their capabilities now, this is only going to grow. Even in terms of voice capabilities. You can have voice conversations with your coach so it can feel very, very real.

I totally appreciate that this can sound really scary. But it’s really important that obviously it’s done in the right way — it’s done safely, the user is protected at all times. But I think, from the healthcare professional perspective, we need to work with it and not against it. Ultimately it is something that is going to be happening, so let’s join this movement together.

Tara Schmidt: Let’s be the knowledge behind it, right?

Ro Huntriss: Definitely. The role of a dietitian and a healthcare provider in these more traditional roles will not go away. It’s still needed. Everything has its place. With technologies, we’re going to be able to support so many more people that perhaps don’t need that complex level of support.

Tara Schmidt: Ro, thank you so much for joining me today. I can’t wait to see all the new technologies that the next few years or maybe even months will bring.

Ro Huntriss: Well, thank you so much. I really, really enjoyed having the conversation with you and yeah, it was a good vibe. I really enjoyed it.

Tara Schmidt: You heard it here. Health technology isn’t going anywhere. Just kidding. I think we all knew that, but still it’s important to be smart about it. It might be helpful to focus on one health area at a time. Master that, and then build from there. For example, maybe you want to start with tracking exercise, and then once you have a weekly routine, start improving your nutrition and then your sleep.

While AI might seem scary, like any tool, it has the potential to do good if used wisely. An AI coach can provide more tailored nutrition advice to more people than a human ever could. But there’s still a place for human conversations, especially for more complex health situations, or treating a medical condition.

Studies have shown apps to be as successful as in-person health interventions in certain cases. The future is here. Let’s let the technology work for us and with us.

That’s all for this episode, but if you’ve got a question or topic suggestion, you can leave us a voicemail at (507) 538-6272. We might even feature your voice on the show. For more “On Nutrition” episodes and resources, check us out online at mayoclinic.org/onnutrition, and you found the show helpful.

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