The Wearable Revolution: When Technology Meets Biology
Wearable technology, ranging from fitness trackers to smartwatches, has become ubiquitous in modern life, rivaling smartphones in its widespread adoption. As celebrities, influencers, and athletes promote their use, their popularity has only increased, with more companies entering the field with their versions of these devices.
However, the basic premise behind these devices isn’t anything new. Wearable devices operate on the principles of biofeedback, providing real-time physiological monitoring and feedback to enable users to modify their behaviors.
During my undergraduate years, biofeedback was utilized as a behavioral treatment to help individuals learn to control involuntary bodily functions, such as heart rate, blood pressure, muscle tension, and skin temperature, primarily to manage conditions including anxiety, stress, pain, and headaches.
In my previous article about AI companions and health apps, I explored how digital technologies promise connection while potentially creating new forms of dependency. Wearable devices present a similar paradox: they offer unprecedented insight into our bodies while potentially fostering an unhealthy obsession with perfect metrics.
The Promise of Wearable Technology
What We’re Wearing Now
Today’s wearables represent just the beginning of what’s possible. Stanford geneticist Michael Snyder, who wears eight sensors daily, including two smartwatches on each wrist, once detected his own Lyme disease using a smartwatch before he had any symptoms. This glimpse into the future shows how wearables could revolutionize healthcare by moving monitoring outside clinical settings. Current devices can track heart rate, sleep patterns, and physical activity. Emerging applications can detect COVID-19 infections before symptoms appear – Snyder’s team reports detecting COVID-19 in 80% of cases, on average, three days before symptom onset. Continuous glucose monitors, such as Abbott’s Freestyle Libre, allow people to see in real time how their diet impacts blood sugar, providing personalized roadmaps for healthier eating.
The Future Is Already Arriving
Tomorrow’s wearables promise to be far more sophisticated and less intrusive. Researchers are developing invisible sensors knit into normal-looking clothing that monitor vital signs continuously, Skin patches that adhere like temporary tattoos, measure glucose and stress hormones, Smart jewelry that tracks health metrics while looking like regular accessories, and Brain-computer interface headphones that monitor focus and attention. Companies like Neurable began to introduce their focus-tracking headphones in the early months of 2025.
Meanwhile, researchers have developed a lightweight CardioTag device that sits on the chest and can detect worsening heart failure before patients experience symptoms or require hospitalization. The most exciting developments involve combining multiple data sources. Future devices will integrate brain activity, sleep patterns, food intake, environmental factors, and other biometric data to provide comprehensive health insights that can predict illness, optimize performance, and personalize treatments.
The Sleep Score Obsession
When Perfect Numbers Become the Goal
In popular culture, achieving peak human performance has come to mean attaining perfect numbers in all areas that these devices measure. More than one-third of Americans now use devices, according to the National Institute of Health, to record and measure their sleep cycles, with the ultimate objective of optimizing their rest.
This obsession has created a new phenomenon: orthosomnia – the preoccupation with obtaining perfect sleep data from trackers that can lead to anxiety and even contribute to insomnia-like symptoms. First identified in 2017, researchers noticed that patients were arriving at sleep specialists’ offices anxious about their sleep tracker data.
Popular media outlets have reported that the competitive aspect of celebrities is exacerbating the situation. In one story, Gwyneth Paltrow and Kim Kardashian have publicly competed for the highest sleep scores measured by Oura Ring devices, turning rest into a performance metric.
The Reality Check About Sleep Data
Many people overestimate the value of their sleep tracker data. About half your sleep should naturally be light sleep, and it’s completely normal to wake up briefly during the night – sleep isn’t supposed to be one solid block of unconsciousness.
Consumer devices aren’t very good at measuring anything beyond basic sleep/wake times and heart rate. Sleep experts warn that “scores” and “recovery” metrics are essentially meaningless, with one researcher comparing them to horoscopes. Even sleep stage tracking is unreliable, as these stages can only be accurately measured by trained humans observing brain waves, not by wearable devices.
The original sleep stages were developed in the 1930s, and even today, two sleep technicians might interpret the same data differently. Your sleep tracker is best used as a simple tool to see when you’re sleeping versus awake, but how you actually feel when you wake up is far more important than any number on your device.
The Medical Revolution Real Clinical Applications
While consumer sleep tracking may be overhyped, legitimate medical applications are emerging rapidly. Researchers have developed sensors so gentle they can monitor premature babies in intensive care without the wire mesh of wires typically required. These wireless devices spare delicate skin while allowing for crucial skin-to-skin contact between mothers. Because these sensors work with smartphones and are reusable, they may be ideal for developing countries that can’t afford expensive monitoring equipment. Thousands have already been deployed to Zambia, Ghana, Kenya, India, Pakistan, and Mexico, potentially saving lives by enabling earlier detection of problems.
Beyond Basic Monitoring
The future applications for wearable technology extend far beyond counting steps or tracking sleep. Mental health monitoring represents one of the most promising frontiers, where devices could continuously track cortisol levels through sweat or interstitial fluid. This would enable doctors to establish individual baselines and monitor whether a patient’s stress levels are improving or worsening over time, combining this information with other measures, such as heart rate and skin conductance, to achieve more precise diagnoses and treatments.
Drug monitoring through wearables could revolutionize how we approach medication management. Instead of the current one-size-fits-all medication approach, sweat-based sensors could offer personalized dosages by informing doctors whether a patient has taken their medication and how quickly they metabolize it. This personalized approach would allow for custom dosages that reduce side effects while making drugs more effective.
Cancer detection represents another frontier where wearables could make a profound difference. Researchers are developing devices that can analyze breath for volatiles associated with various cancers, potentially allowing a wearable to detect whether a cancer patient is in remission.
Similarly, air quality monitoring could help predict respiratory health issues, while behavior tracking in older adults could reveal early changes in cognitive function or memory that might indicate cognitive decline. The ultimate goal isn’t just treatment but prediction. When we can predict conditions or catch disease early, we can intervene sooner and achieve dramatically better health outcomes, potentially transforming reactive healthcare into proactive health maintenance.
The Human Body Is Not a Machine
Understanding Our Biological Reality
Here lies the fundamental challenge with wearable technology: the human body is not a machine that can be optimized through perfect data inputs.
Unlike a car dashboard that provides clear, actionable information about mechanical systems, our bodies are complex biological systems influenced by countless variables, including genetics, stress, environment, relationships, and factors we don’t yet understand.
Perhaps most importantly, there is no “normal” that applies to everyone. What constitutes a healthy resting heart rate, optimal sleep duration, or ideal stress response varies dramatically between individuals. A person’s genetics, age, fitness level, medical history, and even cultural background all influence their baseline metrics.
An athlete’s resting heart rate might be considered dangerously low for someone else, while a person who naturally functions well on six hours of sleep shouldn’t force themselves to get eight hours just because that’s the recommended average. This individual variation makes it challenging—if not impossible—to establish universal metrics that are meaningful for every person.
Yet many wearable devices present data as if there are standard ranges everyone should achieve, creating artificial targets that may be entirely inappropriate for individual users. A 70-year-old with a pacemaker will have different heart rate patterns than a 25-year-old marathon runner, and both can be perfectly healthy within their own contexts.
Treating our bodies like machines that should perform consistently and predictably is where the danger lies. This mechanistic thinking can lead to anxiety about normal variation in daily metrics, hyper fixation on achieving perfect scores rather than listening to how we actually feel, loss of body awareness as we become more dependent on external validation from devices, and ignoring obvious symptoms if our device says everything is “normal.”
The Stress Paradox
Ironically, obsessing over health metrics can create the very problems we’re trying to prevent. When you stress about sleep scores, it activates your body’s stress response, which can keep you awake longer. As anxiety increases, quality sleep becomes more elusive. The same pattern applies to other metrics: constantly monitoring can become a source of chronic, low-level stress that undermines the health we’re trying to optimize.
The Privacy and Control Problem
What Happens to Your Data
Like the AI companions and health apps I discussed in my previous article, wearables raise serious privacy concerns. Many health apps don’t fall within HIPAA privacy laws that protect sensitive health information. Fewer than half of mobile apps for depression have privacy policies, and some employ questionable practices like making cancellation difficult or using aggressive marketing tactics.
The data collected by wearables is incredibly intimate, including sleep patterns, heart rate variability, location data, and potentially soon, stress hormones, brain activity, and other biomarkers. Users often have little control over how this data is used, whether it’s shared with third parties or how it might be used against them in the future.
The Regulation Gap
The regulatory landscape is still problematic. Some health apps are classified as medical devices under FDA oversight, while others are exempt as “general wellness” tools. Most wearable features fall into regulatory gray areas where oversight is minimal. As psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer argues, algorithm transparency should be a human right: “If it is transparent, you can actually modify it and start thinking for yourself again, rather than relying on an algorithm.” Without transparency, we lose control to tech companies and their commercial interests.
Finding Balance in the Wearable Age
Using Technology as a Guide, Not a Master
The key to benefiting from wearable technology lies in maintaining the right relationship with it. These devices work best when used as:
Awareness tools that help you notice patterns over time, Educational aids that teach you about your body’s responses, Motivation boosters for positive behavior changes, and Early warning systems for significant health changes.
They work poorly when we Obsess over daily variations in metrics that naturally fluctuate. Ignore our subjective experience in favor of device readings. Compete with others on arbitrary scores. Allow devices to dictate our mood or self-worth.
Practical Guidelines for Healthy Use
Focus on trends, not daily numbers: examine patterns over weeks and months rather than day-to-day fluctuations. Trust your body’s signals – If you feel rested but your device indicates you slept poorly, trust your own feelings. Set boundaries – Consider taking regular breaks from monitoring to maintain body awareness.
Understand the limitations: remember that consumer devices measure proxies, not direct biological processes. Seek professional guidance – Use concerning patterns as reasons to consult healthcare providers, not for self-diagnosis. Maintain privacy awareness – Understand what data you’re sharing and with whom.
The Road Ahead Potential and Pitfalls
Wearable technology has the potential to revolutionize healthcare, increasing the accessibility of monitoring and enabling healthier choices for people. The ability to detect infections before symptoms appear, continuously monitor chronic conditions, and personalize treatments based on individual data could transform medicine.
However, we must navigate this technological revolution thoughtfully. The same devices that could save lives through early detection could also create new forms of anxiety, dependency, and social pressure around health metrics.
Research and Regulation Needs
We need:
- Longitudinal studies on the psychological effects of continuous health monitoring,
- Clear regulations distinguishing between medical devices and wellness gadgets,
- Transparency requirements for data use and algorithm decision-making, Education programs helping people understand both capabilities and limitations.
Using Wearable Data: Staying Human in a Quantified World
As we have discussed, the wearable revolution presents both a tremendous opportunity and a significant risk. These devices can provide valuable insights into our health and help us make positive changes. However, they can also create new forms of stress, anxiety, and disconnection from our natural body awareness. The human body evolved sophisticated internal monitoring systems over millions of years. We can sense fatigue, hunger, stress, and illness through countless subtle signals.
While technology can enhance this natural wisdom, it should not replace it. As we embrace these powerful new tools, we must remember that optimal health isn’t about achieving perfect metrics—it’s about feeling good, functioning well, and maintaining the energy and resilience to live fully.
The best wearable device is one that helps you better understand and care for your body while still trusting your own experience of being human. As I cautioned about AI companions creating “the illusion of intimacy without the demands,” we must be wary of wearables promising “the illusion of optimal health without wisdom.” True wellness comes from the complex interplay of physical, mental, emotional, and social factors that no device can fully capture or optimize. Use these remarkable tools wisely, but never forget: you are not a machine to be optimized, but a human being to be understood, respected, and cared for – by yourself and others.
If you have questions about integrating wearable technology into your health routine or concerns about digital wellness, please feel free to contact my office. Your call will always be private and confidential.
