Microsoft's new fitness band aims to create the robotic coach that Google is already secretly building

Microsoft released a new fitness band today with an ambitious goal of creating a super-smart wellness coach. On top of the normal sensors for tracking steps and sleep, Microsoft’s Health platform will crunch the data on activity to see how behaviors throughout the day impact a user’s health.

“On days when I have a lot of meetings, do I sleep a lot? On days when I eat breakfast, do I run faster or slower? How many calories did you burn from fat while you worked out, versus calories from carbs? How many times did you wake up last night? Why?” asks Microsoft vice president Yusuf Mehdi, explaining the long-term goals of the company’s health platform.

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Potentially, this approach to health has the power to radically influence our behavior for the better. We make thousands of tiny decisions every day that could be making a big difference to our mental state, work performance, and physical health.

Microsoft’s challenge is to get as many users sharing their data at possible — otherwise, it will only be able to detect behaviors that have a significant impact on behavioral outcomes.

For instance, I may naturally experience a range of deep sleep every night — say, from 60-90 minutes. If a stressful meeting with my boss ends up decreasing my deep sleep by 10 percent, that meeting would also have to happen on a day when I didn’t get much deep sleep (let’s say, 65 minutes, meaning my total sleep was less than 60 minutes), for Microsoft to even recognize that something was off.

In order to detect a 10 percent difference on a day of normal sleep, it would have to compare me to thousands of other users, who may have also experienced worse sleep after a big meeting.

This is where Google comes in: They have a massive user base sharing everything from calendar data to email habits. A few years ago, Google’s new director of engineering, futurist Ray Kurzweil, told me that he planned on building a “cybernetic friend” that automatically recommended behavior changes to users.

“This friend of yours, this cybernetic friend, that knows that you have certain questions about certain health issues or business strategies. … It can then be canvassing all the new information that comes out in the world every minute and then bring things to your attention without you asking about them.”

Indeed, Google’s CEO Larry Page said at TED that he wants to create a world where everyone shares their health data. He predicted that such a database could save thousands of lives, thanks to Google’s ability to detect and prevent health problems.

Google’s health ambition is in the early stages. A few months ago, when I spoke to Google’s product team at the launch of their own health platform, Android Wear, they told me that this kind of behavior mining was in the pipeline.

At the moment, the Wear team is just busy building out data standards on things like sleep and heart rate that can be shared across multiple devices. That way, no matter what device people are using to measure their body signals, it can all be uploaded into a dataset with comparable information.

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All signs point to the fact that Google is already building the capability to build a super-intelligent fitness coach. And they have a much richer dataset to work from. But we don’t know where Google’s priorities are, so Microsoft may be beat them to the punch.

Either way, it’s a race to make an extraordinary impact on consumer health, and that’s a race that benefits everyone.