Sumbul Desai Is the Woman Behind Apple’s Billion-Dollar Quest to Improve Your Health
Sumbul Desai, MD, has our health in her hands. As the vice president of health at Apple, she says anything that touches health at the company, “I’m responsible for.” In layman’s terms that means the period cycles app on your watch and phone, the ECG monitor on your watch, the app that measures your blood oxygen levels…the list goes on. And is likely to get longer. Earlier this year, in February 2025, Apple announced more than $500 billion in investments, which analysts predict will have a profound impact on consumer health—and the advancements Dr. Desai will be able to make in her work. Right now she’s excited about the ongoing rollout of the hearing test and hearing aid functions of the Airpods Pro 2s.
It’s not just the technological advancements that drive her, though. It’s her patients—more than 2 billion Apple users around the world. Her mission? To “empower people to take their own data and use it in a way that can drive better decision-making and advocate for themselves should they have a health issue,” she says.
Personal advocacy, she reiterates, is key, a stance influenced by her own experiences. Desai didn’t start out in medicine. She wanted to be a journalist and started working at ABC News in 2000. But a year later, while she was home visiting her family, her mom had a massive stroke. “She went into a coma right in front of me,” she says. On the advice of doctors, Desai had to learn how to be her mom’s fiercest advocate. She took leave for a year and a half to care for her; when she returned to work, “It just wasn’t the same. It’s not that I didn’t appreciate what I did, but I just wanted to do more. So I went back to medical school when I was 30.”
The rest, as they say, is history. That foundational experience with her mom has been her guide ever since for all her patients’ lives. “I want your relationship with your doctor to be richer,” she explains.
Here, she shares the lessons she’s learned along the way and her tips for making the most of your gadgets.
Glamour: So, we’re opening our watches or our phones—what are the key apps we should be checking from a daily health perspective?
Sumbul Desai: The Health and the Fitness apps are critical. The Health app in particular brings together all of your movement data. If I were to prescribe anything, I always say movement. It also has your heart rate data, your resting heart rate, your VO2 max, your cardio fitness, how much you slept. So I’m understanding what happened last night, and how I can plan my day to improve my next night.
