MW The latest Oura and Fitbit wearables are smarter and sleeker than ever - but do they keep you healthy?
By Jaimy Lee
Americans are sharing data from watches, bands and rings with AI platforms, ordering tests through the companies that sell these products, and paying hundreds of dollars a year in subscription fees
Wearables are more sophisticated today than 10 years ago. They are also smaller, have longer-lasting batteries and are increasingly screenless.
The biggest advance in preventive medicine might well be that thin band on your wrist or titanium ring on your finger.
Wearable devices like the Apple Watch, the Whoop band and the Oura ring are soaring in popularity in the latest sign that the days of simply counting your steps or reviewing your sleep score are over. Americans now rely on sophisticated health trackers to gather a plethora of biological data that they're then feeding to artificial-intelligence platforms to get personalized recommendations for diet and exercise or using as a basis to have blood work done.
"There is clearly a shift from fitness tracker and fitness novelty to embedded health device," said Shawn DuBravac, a futurist and former chief economist for the Consumer Technology Association. "It's only going to pick up from here."
Whoop, which sells screenless bands popular with athletes, recently raised $575 million. It now has a $10 billion valuation and is expected to go public soon. Alphabet unit $(GOOGL)$ $(GOOG)$ Google surprised investors earlier this month with the launch of the Fitbit Air, a band similar to Whoop's but cheaper and integrated with a Gemini-based health coach. Garmin's stock $(GRMN)$ is up 17% this year on record revenue. And over the last week Oura confidentially filed for an IPO and launched a slimmer version of its popular smart ring.
AI isn't the only new reason that health trackers have evolved into a go-to tool for staying healthy. At the same time, current federal health officials are actively promoting wearables to an American public that largely says it wants to be healthier.
A recent Pew Research Center survey found that 78% of people who put effort into being healthier do so to lower their risk of health problems in the future. They are spending their own money on GLP-1 medications to lose weight and drinking less alcohol. A Whoop study found that new users consumed less alcohol, perhaps due to lifestyle changes fueled by daily feedback.
"Consumers are taking health into their own hands," said Erin Wright, an analyst with Morgan Stanley.
But the data produced by wearables still doesn't have a home in the U.S. healthcare system. Doctors can be dismissive of the information gleaned from an Apple Watch, and putting that data into electronic medical records is cumbersome when it is possible. So if or when a health issue emerges or a worrisome notification pops up, patients still have to find their way into the traditional healthcare system.
"It's a closed ecosystem," said Kenneth Civello, a cardiologist in Baton Rouge, La., who consults for several wearables companies. "We need to invest in the infrastructure to get that information at the point of care."
Wearables versus the annual physical
The idea for wearable pedometers has been around for hundreds of years, but the notion of trying to get 10,000 steps a day was developed by a physician as a marketing campaign to encourage physical activity before the Tokyo Olympics in the 1960s.
The Fitbit, launched in 2009, popularized that concept and then was acquired by Google a decade later. This was the first wave of health tracking, an era in which Americans largely viewed wearables as gadgets only worth buying on sale on Black Friday or after Christmas. According to Civello, the next wave - in which wearables can detect conditions like atrial fibrillation, hypertension and sleep apnea - is happening now. He thinks the third wave will focus on predicting health incidents and outcomes, he said.
"Once we get to that, it's going to be hard not to wear a smartwatch," he said.
Today's wearables are far more sophisticated than those of 10 years ago. Several can detect car crashes or spikes in heart rate as a result of tachycardia, along with such conditions as atrial fibrillation and sleep apnea. Some can track blood pressure and menstrual cycles. It all started with Apple $(AAPL)$ and Stanford Medicine's landmark study in 2019 that confirmed that the Apple Watch's optical pulse sensor could detect A-fib.
"It's a great thing that we're seeing this interest and cultural shift into wearables," said Mintu Turakhia, a cardiac electrophysiologist who co-led that study. "Ultimately, it's helping detect conditions or pre-conditions early enough to enter clinical evaluation - to enter the healthcare system in an informed and appropriate way - and giving people the agency to make lifestyle choices to avoid disease progression."
As wearables became part of everyday life, it's no surprise that they stopped being as flashy, or big, as they used to be. The latest wearables blend into the background in a way the near-ubiquitous Apple Watch does not. They are sleeker, have longer-lasting batteries and are increasingly screenless. And a band or ring doesn't mean those with a status-symbol watch have to leave it at home.
Wearable devices are now stacked with a range of Food and Drug Administration-cleared features like heart-rate monitoring and services like AI-powered health coaching or the ability to schedule lab tests for common biomarkers with companies like Quest Diagnostics $(DGX)$ or Labcorp $(LH)$. In exchange, most users pay between $70 and $360 for an annual subscription. It costs extra for access to Oura's and Whoop's labs features, which analyze results as they come in. A Morgan Stanley-commissioned survey found that the average consumer who engages with these services does 3.2 tests over three years, likely to track progress as they change their behavior.
"Some of this is just making it more accessible, digestible and usable for the consumer from a healthcare perspective," Morgan Stanley's Wright said, "and it's coming at a time where everyone's paying more out of pocket for healthcare."
This is where the competing interests start to collide. The makers of these devices want to build and growing recurring-revenue streams. The people who want to be healthier are willing to spend money on wearables, self-pay lab testing, and personal large language models or AI health coaches.
Yet wearables aren't a substitute for a primary-care doctor or a heart specialist - "It doesn't replace an annual physical, but it certainly can help augment some of that," DuBravac observed - and detection of A-fib or another condition should be linked to medical care.
"We have to be very careful in assuming that this is the fix for longevity and wellness for everyone," said Turakhia, who is also the chief medical and scientific officer at iRhythm Technologies $(IRTC)$, which develops and markets medical-grade wearables.
The popularity of the devices is undeniable. One out of every three people in the U.S. uses one, and this mass appeal is happening at the same time as rising healthcare costs are forcing some Americans to skip or delay medical care. Some people are choosing to bypass the health-insurance system, instead investing in health savings accounts and flexible savings accounts so that they can spend their tax-advantaged money judiciously on the care and technology that works best for them and their budgets.
Healthcare executives refer to this as "consumer-driven healthcare." It's a pillar of the Trump administration's healthcare agenda, which has included expanding access to HSAs and lowering the prices of certain medications for consumers to buy them directly.
For several years, the legality of buying a wearable with HSA or FSA funds was unclear. But a provision tucked into last year's One Big Beautiful Bill Act officially changed the Internal Revenue Code to allow people to spend up to $375 each from those accounts to purchase a wearable and related subscriptions. This change and the FDA's decision this year to limit how wearables and their services are regulated are a boon to the companies that sell these devices.
"We think that wearables are a key to the MAHA agenda of making America healthy again," Robert F. Kennedy Jr., secretary of the Department of Human and Health Services and the unofficial leader of the Make America Healthy Again movement, told lawmakers last year. "My vision is that every American is wearing a wearable within four years."
-Jaimy Lee
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(END) Dow Jones Newswires
May 28, 2026 13:39 ET (17:39 GMT)
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