# Personal Care Utility (PCU): Building the Health Infrastructure for Everyday Insight and Guidance

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.22602 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.22602/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 7 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Oct 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Foundation Metrics for Evaluating Effectiveness of Healthcare Conversations Powered by Generative AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.12444/) (2023)
- [The Anatomy of a Personal Health Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.20148/) (2025)
- [A Navigational Approach to Health: Actionable Guidance for Improved Quality of Life](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01638/) (2018)
- [Cross-Modal Health State Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.06462/) (2018)
- [Personal Mental Health Navigator: Harnessing the Power of Data, Personal Models, and Health Cybernetics to Promote Psychological Well-being](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09131/) (2020)
- [Automated Fusion of Multimodal Electronic Health Records for Better Medical Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.11252/) (2024)
- [Detecting Events of Daily Living Using Multimodal Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.09402/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Personal Care Utility: Health as Everyday Infrastructure](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.14145/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.