What an AI sees that a dashboard does not
A dashboard shows numbers. An AI report shows the relationships between them. That is the difference, and it is more useful than it sounds.
Examples of what shows up in real reports:
- HRV consistently lower on the days following long Zone 2 sessions, and recovering when a rest day is added.
- Resting heart rate trending up across the week alongside two short nights of sleep.
- A drop in workout volume that matches a stretch of higher than usual stand hours, suggesting more activity overall but less structured training.
- A peak training week where every metric agrees, and the Wellness Score reflects that.
None of these are interesting on their own. All of them are interesting when seen together, which is the point.
What gets sent and what does not
The app does not add personal identifiers to report requests. There is no name, no email, no device ID, no account ID added by the app. What goes through the proxy is a structured summary of the metrics the report needs: a few weekly aggregates, daily values for HRV and resting heart rate, workout summaries.
The AI service receives only that summary. It is configured for zero data retention where supported. The proxy processes limited technical metadata needed to route the request, debug errors, and prevent abuse.
Your full Apple Health history, reports, and profile are stored on your device.
Wellness, deliberately not medical
VitalBrief is a wellness app. The reports use words like trends, patterns, observations, and insights. They never use diagnostic language. If you want a medical reading of your data, that is a conversation for a qualified healthcare professional, with their own tools and your raw numbers.
What the AI is good at is being a patient reader of long-running data. That is most of what we want from this kind of feature, and very little of what most fitness apps actually do.
What kinds of insights you get
The reports adapt to what the app knows about you. If your profile says you train mostly running and cycling, the language and benchmarks are different than if you mostly do strength training. Sport-aware context is built into how the prompt is constructed, not bolted on after.
The cadence is two reports plus an onboarding one:
- Welcome report: looks at the past 12 months in monthly slices, generated once after onboarding.
- Weekly report: 200 to 350 words, written every week.
- Monthly report: 400 to 600 words with a month-over-month comparison table.