Microsoft launches Copilot Health to analyze data from smartwatches and medical records

Microsoft has added a dedicated section, Copilot Health, to its Copilot AI assistant. The module analyzes a user's medical data and helps them make sense of it.

What Copilot Health can do

The service pulls several categories of health data into a single interface and lets users ask questions in natural language: what a given metric means, how it has changed over time, and what is recommended when a value falls outside the normal range.

Microsoft states explicitly that Copilot Health does not diagnose conditions and does not replace a doctor. Its role is to help users understand their own data and arrive at an appointment with specific questions rather than a blank stare.

The product's core premise: most people have already accumulated health data in fitness bands, clinic apps and lab results. But there is no universal tool that ties it all together and explains it in plain language, without requiring a medical education. Copilot Health targets that gap.

What data it processes

At launch, four categories of sources are supported:

• Wearable devices: smartwatches and fitness bands via standard health APIs
• Electronic medical records in FHIR format, a standard supported by the largest EMR systems in the US
• Lab test results, via integration with laboratories or manual upload
• Activity, sleep and nutrition data from tracker apps

Geographically, the service is aimed primarily at the US market, where FHIR infrastructure is well developed and a legal framework exists for exchanging medical data between systems.

Privacy: the key question

Handing medical data to Microsoft requires a fundamentally different level of trust than storing files in OneDrive. The company says it fully complies with the HIPAA standard and promises that this data will not be used to train language models. Processing takes place in an isolated environment with additional access controls.

Still, medical data is the most sensitive category of personal information. In Europe, its processing is governed by special GDPR provisions (the so-called "special categories" of data); in Russia, by Federal Law No. 152-FZ and the requirements for medical information systems. An international launch will inevitably run into these regulatory barriers.

"We want to give people a tool that helps them understand their health and better prepare for a conversation with their doctor," from an official

Microsoft statement.

Competitors in the niche

Microsoft is not the only company moving toward "personal medical AI." Apple Health has been collecting a similar set of data for several years and works with clinics. Google is developing the area through Fitbit and healthcare research projects. Amazon launched Amazon Clinic. OpenAI calls medicine one of its main vertical priorities.

The key difference in Microsoft's approach is that it is built into the existing Copilot, which has an audience in the hundreds of millions of users across Windows, Microsoft 365 and mobile apps. Users do not need to install a separate medical service: the feature appears where they already work.

What this means

Healthcare is becoming one of the most competitive fronts for large AI companies. Copilot Health is Microsoft's bid to be the intermediary between people and their medical data in everyday life. For users, that is convenient. For the healthcare system, it means a new type of patient who arrives at an appointment with an AI interpretation of their test results. How useful that proves depends on how accurate those interpretations are.