Activas: Modern Design with a Sprinkling of AI

Activas is a new health and wellness tracker for the iPhone and iPad from developer Brian Hough, who built it from the ground up with Apple Intelligence and Liquid Glass in mind. The app serves as a dashboard that brings together information from the Health app in a colorful and easy-to-understand way, using progressive disclosure to avoid overwhelming users with data. It’s a fantastic example of modern design that marries form and function to elevate the user experience.

The app has just two tabs that adopt iOS 26’s Liquid Glass design without sacrificing legibility. The default view is the Dashboard, which can display your recent health and wellness metrics for the last 7, 15, or 30 days. At the top of the Dashboard is a Momentum Score that’s calculated based on a composite of step count, sleep, resting heart rate, and BMI targets, plus your calorie goal. Unlike many similar apps, Activas links to research supporting its targets, which I appreciate. The Momentum Score and a handful of additional stats can also be tracked using one of the app’s Home Screen widgets.

The Momentum Score is followed by an AI-generated insight about your metrics. Because I haven’t been tracking my calories or weight recently, the app suggested I should. That’s followed by overviews of Activity, Nutrition, Sleep, Vitals, and Body Measurement. Each of these sections appears as a SwiftUI-style card that includes graphs showing recent trends, an insight about your metrics, and a suggested question that you can ask the Activas AI with a tap. Sections can be turned on and off and reordered in the app’s settings, too.

The Dashboard’s design is superb. By collecting individual measurements in groups of related statistics and providing a takeaway about each section, the app allows users to get a quick, understandable overview of where they’re succeeding and what needs work.

Diving in a little deeper with individual sections of the app.

However, Activas provides more than just a bird’s-eye view of your health. You can tap any of the cards in the Dashboard to drill down into additional details, where the data has more room. This allows you to read individual daily statistics by swiping across each point on the graph. Another nice feature is that you can export your Dashboard as a PDF and share it with a trainer or medical professional.

The Activas AI tab has the look of a chatbot, but your interactions with it are constrained. When you open the tab, you’re presented with an auto-generated summary that highlights your stats, identifies trends, and lists some action items. The summary is concise and fits nicely with the top-level view provided by the Dashboard.

Chatting with Activas.

To dig deeper, there are also four questions at the bottom of the section that you can pose to the AI, plus a ‘More Suggestions’ option. It’s not possible to ask your own questions like you would with a chatbot, which I think is for the best given the potential harm that could be caused by AI hallucinations. I asked Hough about the simple, pre-defined questions and was told that they’re backed by more complex prompts to protect against misinformation and other potential issues. Each question returns a one-paragraph response, allowing you to gain additional insights about your health statistics. It’s worth noting that the AI interactions all occur on-device to protect user privacy, too. While some users may be left wanting more detailed insights, I appreciate the more conservative, privacy-centric approach that Activas takes.

I’ve been impressed with the way Activas synthesizes a broad array of data in a clear, digestible way. The only bug I seem to have run into is that the app reports my sleep time as being far longer than what’s shown in the Health app. Hough suspects that Activas might be double counting because I have multiple apps tracking my sleep and is looking into a fix.

Despite that issue, I like Activas a lot. Not every app needs to be a workout and tracking app. Simple tracking goes a long way, especially if you’re satisfied with Apple’s Fitness app or another workout tool. And by bringing so much data to bear in such a clear, elegant way, Activas promises to help a lot of people understand their fitness better, which is fantastic.

Activas is available on the App Store as a free download for the iPhone and iPad.