Personal Care Utility (PCU): Building the Health Infrastructure for Everyday Insight and Guidance
This addresses the need for lifelong, adaptive health support for individuals and populations, representing a new paradigm rather than an incremental improvement.
The paper tackles the problem of fragmented and episodic healthcare by proposing the Personal Care Utility (PCU), a global AI-powered system that provides continuous, personalized health guidance, promising improved outcomes for individuals and new opportunities for public health.
Building on decades of success in digital infrastructure and biomedical innovation, we propose the Personal Care Utility (PCU) - a cybernetic system for lifelong health guidance. PCU is conceived as a global, AI-powered utility that continuously orchestrates multimodal data, knowledge, and services to assist individuals and populations alike. Drawing on multimodal agents, event-centric modeling, and contextual inference, it offers three essential capabilities: (1) trusted health information tailored to the individual, (2) proactive health navigation and behavior guidance, and (3) ongoing interpretation of recovery and treatment response after medical events. Unlike conventional episodic care, PCU functions as an ambient, adaptive companion - observing, interpreting, and guiding health in real time across daily life. By integrating personal sensing, experiential computing, and population-level analytics, PCU promises not only improved outcomes for individuals but also a new substrate for public health and scientific discovery. We describe the architecture, design principles, and implementation challenges of this emerging paradigm.