The Wellness Wire: Issue 17

😮 From smart pads to smarter workouts

🧪 Imagine a sanitary pad that doubles as a mini-lab. Hidden paper test strips change colour when they meet proteins linked to inflammation and ovarian cancer risk; snap a phone photo and a burst of machine learning turns the pattern into an instant health heads-up, no clinic queue required.

🏃‍♀️Now picture your lunch-hour run. As your heart rate climbs, Workout Buddy, Apple Watch’s new on-device coach, reads your pace, fatigue and training history. It quietly nudges you mid-session. No cloud involved. Just you and a smart coach on your wrist helping you hit that negative split.

Two very different use cases, one clear thread: artificial intelligence is weaving itself into everyday health habits, turning simple moments into data-rich feedback loops that deliver earlier warnings, smarter nudges, and perhaps even fewer trips to the doctor.

📈 Tech’s ascent in numbers

• US $34.3 bn by 2027: the global fitness app market is set to skyrocket from US$15 bn in 2022, thanks to always-on AI coaching and subscription models. 

• 534.6 million wearables shipped in 2024, a 5.4% jump year on year, putting a health sensor on roughly one in fourteen humans.

• 882 FDA-cleared AI/ML medical devices are now on the US market, up nearly 200 in just nine months.

• US $3.0 bn of digital-health capital landed in Q1 2025 across 122 deals, signalling investors are back after 2024’s dip.

• Remote patient monitoring is projected to quadruple from US $50.4 bn in 2024 to US $203.7 bn by 2032 as sensors leave hospitals for homes.
  

These figures sketch a clear arc: personal health tech is moving from early-adopter novelty to everyday infrastructure, with capital, regulators and consumers all speeding up the shift.

🤿 Deep dive – can AI end disease or ageing?

AlphaFold 3 lifts the ceiling. Google DeepMind’s newest model predicts how proteins, DNA, RNA and small-molecule drugs fit together with substantially higher accuracy than earlier tools, giving scientists an open server that turns tricky structure work into a routine desktop step. The potential for drug discovery and development is staggering.

Self-driving wet labs keep the loop turning. Networks of AI-guided robots now run thousands of chemistry or protein-engineering experiments while human scientists sleep, showing that automated benches can roam chemical space far faster than interns ever could.

Agentic trial planners appear. ClinicalAgent, a GPT-4 multi-agent system, predicts clinical-trial outcomes significantly better than standard prompts, hinting at whole in-silico trials that slash years and costs from drug development. Why run an expensive trial when an AI agent can predict the results?

Proof in patients. The fibrosis drug INS018-055, discovered end-to-end by generative AI, has already advanced to Phase II testing in idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. That’s 18 months from idea to clinic when it would normally have taken a decade or longer.

A privacy wake-up call. After a 2023 breach, genetics giant 23andMe filed for Chapter 11 in March 2025. Nearly two million users (about 15% of its base) have since asked the company to delete their DNA data for fear of what it might be used for.

Taken together, open protein oracles, robot chemists, reasoning agents, and AI-discovered drugs are stitching into a feedback loop that could push many diseases toward the history books. Is it too good to be true?

🎯 Quick hits

• Face-scan vitals
  Remote photoplethysmography technology enables mobile devices to measure heart rate, blood pressure, SpO₂, and HRV from a brief video-selfie. A health kiosk in your pocket opens the doors to frictionless screening, higher health engagement, and entirely new models of preventive care. Imagine a feature like that coming to Strove 👀

• Cuff-less blood pressure
  A UK clinical study is trialling wrist-based optical sensors that track blood pressure around the clock, capturing night-time dips and medication effects that a once-off cuff would miss.
  

• Therapy bot passes the test
  In a randomised trial of 210 adults, an AI chatbot cut depression and anxiety scores nearly twice as much as wait-list control after eight weeks.
  

Pocket ultrasound + AI
Deep-learning analysis of smartphone-tethered liver scans now detects significant fibrosis with startling accuracy, bringing hospital-grade imaging to primary care.

🔦 Strove spotlight

Not to be left behind, Strove’s computer-vision meal scanner has already examined thousands of dishes, and the early findings are eye-opening:

🫛 25% of meals have no fruit or veg at all.
🍗 41% fall short on protein.
🍠 68% are low in fibre.
🍬 Most popular treat logged: gum sweets.

Look out for tailored feedback and smarter tools to help you eat better, all thanks to this mind-blowing tech. 

Next on the runway is Signals, a personal “health ticker” that turns your wearable and lifestyle data into plain-English alerts and advice. Think: Reduced exercise lately has increased your sleep latency.

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