Apple's Camera Watches You Exercise. It Found the Writer's Tight Hamstrings. Flexibility Is Quantifiable, Apparently.
PCMag's senior writer spent two days testing Apple's camera-guided fitness assessments in the iOS 27.2 public beta, which transforms the Health app into an AI fitness coach. The system uses the iPhone camera to evaluate movement and, in this case, ruthlessly identified poor flexibility as the tester's primary physical weakness. The implication is that your phone may be edging toward replacing a personal trainer.
This illustrates computer vision as a diagnostic mirror. The mechanism is pose estimation: algorithms infer joint angles from video frames and compare them against biomechanical baselines. The lesson is that AI's most useful function is often not flattery but honest assessment. It holds up a data-driven mirror and tells you what you have been avoiding.
Apple, via the iOS 27.2 public beta, is building camera-guided fitness assessments directly into the Health app. PCMag's senior writer for smart home and wearables tested it and reported it exposed lack of flexibility as a key weakness.
- Enroll your iPhone in the iOS public beta program at beta.apple.com and install iOS 27.2 to access the Health app's new fitness coach features. Expected outcome: Your device gains the AI-powered fitness assessment tools.
- Open the Health app and locate the camera-guided fitness assessment, then follow the on-screen prompts to perform the guided movements in front of your front-facing camera. Expected outcome: The app captures your movement patterns and analyzes them in real time.
- Review the assessment report it generates, noting which physical attributes it flags as weakest. Expected outcome: You receive a brutally honest, individualized flexibility or mobility score that you can act on or ignore at your peril.