How Wearables Are Slowly Turning Into Personal Health Coaches in 2025
On a recent Monday afternoon, I opened Oura I opened the app on my phone and asked a simple question: “Even though I got enough sleep last night, I’m still tired. What should I do?”
It recommends that I take a walk, stretch, or hydrate to lift my spirits and increase my energy levels.
Oura, whose chatbot makes smart rings that measure sleep, heart rate, skin temperature and other metrics, responds quickly, reminding people that quality is just as important as quantity. sleep. The AI coach within the Oura app was able to use all the data processed by the Oura algorithm behind the scenes to give me recommendations based on my habits.
Interactions like this portend smart watch The direction of the industry is 2025 and beyond. Smartwatches promise to better interpret health metrics, connect the dots between biometric data points, and turn those trends into actionable insights rather than just displaying dashboards of statistics. Samsung and Google In 2024, they took a step in this direction by launching new AI tools in their respective health apps to provide deeper insights into your health data.
Meanwhile, fitness remains the primary use case for wearables, electronic marketer In its 2023 report, it noted that artificial intelligence is playing an increasing role on phones and computers, opening up new ways to manage tasks and process and interpret data on devices and in the cloud. It’s the intersection of fitness trackers and artificial intelligence processing that could bring smarter health companions to our wrists, fingers, eyes and ears.
“Continuous health monitoring, early detection, prevention, personalized health care, that’s where it’s all going,” said Ranjit Atwal, research director in Gartner’s Quantitative Innovation team. “So you can get something specific to you. and personalized information about your background.”
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Smartwatches are becoming smarter health coaches
Smartwatches have been positioned as health companions for years, but they’re finally starting to deliver on that promise. This is thanks in part to greater investment in artificial intelligence, which companies are using to generate more valuable insights and make health data easier to understand.
Instead of analyzing tables and charts showing your sleep patterns or exercise data, why not Fitbit Generate a custom chart based on your problem? Or what if you could ask Siri how you slept last night instead of reaching for your phone?
These are examples of the types of scenarios that exist today. For example, Google Insight Explorer in the Fitbit app can answer questions about your Fitbit data. Apple Watch can handle questions about certain types of Get health data via Siri Available on Series 9 models and above. Samsung also launched a new rating called energy fractionwhich collates various sleep and activity metrics to provide information about your current state, much like Oura and Fitbit’s Readiness Score.
Oura Ring 4 can measure a variety of health and wellness statistics.
Canalys research analyst Jack Leathem points to smart rings like Oura and Zepp (a health app that works with Amazfit smartwatches) as two examples that are particularly leading the way in health guidance and insights.
“They’ve actually driven quite a bit of innovation in the smartwatch space,” Latham said of smart rings like Oura. “Suppliers need to catch up.”
Apple and Samsung may plan to develop their own full-fledged health chatbots in the future. Apple is reportedly developing a digital health coach that will provide health and lifestyle advice based on artificial intelligence and Apple Watch data Bloomberg. Samsung is testing a digital health coach that uses large language models to provide health insights based on a user’s habits, such as whether they sleep better after exercising. According to CNET June.
Such features will become increasingly important as household names like Apple, Samsung and Google’s Fitbit face additional competition from smart rings like Oura and cheaper wrist-worn wearables like Amazfit. For example, Samsung launched its first smart ring in 2024 as a health-tracking alternative for those who want a more independent, less distracting device.
But bringing additional AI-powered functionality to smartwatches is particularly challenging given their small size. They lack the computing power needed to process large amounts of data on their devices. That’s why the smartwatch space has been relatively quiet when it comes to new AI tools compared to smartphones, laptops, and tablets, all of which are packed with new AI-driven software tricks and tools. For example, Apple Intelligence is available on iPhone, iPad, and Mac, but not Apple Watch.
Pixel Watch 3
“Because of the nature of generative AI, you need a cloud or other processing unit to do the processing,” said David McQueen, research director at ABI Research. “And I don’t think smartwatches have that capability yet.”
Google acknowledges this fact. In addition to selling its own Pixel watches, Google also operates the Wear OS software that powers many Android-compatible smartwatches. when Asked in May Bjorn Kilburn, Google’s vice president of Wear OS and Android Health, said whether the Google Gemini model is possible to run on Wear OS smartwatches may “take some time.”
More dramatic changes are yet to come
The most interesting changes to smartwatches seem to be happening on the software side. On the hardware front, we can probably expect routine upgrades such as new processors, new strap styles, and improved durability.
“Ultimately, it might make things out there better and more accurate,” McQueen said.
Tech giants like Apple and Samsung are making more use of the sensors already on their smartwatches, as evidenced by the new sensors. sleep apnea detection Featured products launched by both companies this year. For example, Apple uses the Apple Watch’s accelerometer to detect subtle movements associated with breathing obstructions.
Newer models of Apple Watch can detect possible symptoms of sleep apnea.
Certain models of Samsung Galaxy Watch outside the United States Supports blood pressure readings When calibrated using a cuff-based monitor, this is another sign that smartwatches are indeed continuing to evolve into more sophisticated health monitors.
But existing hardware and sensors have their limitations. Apple is said to have been working toward the ambitious goal of using a smartwatch to measure changes in blood sugar for years, but it likely won’t happen anytime soon. Bloomberg Reports suggest that such a device is still years away as Apple has struggled to make the technology small enough to fit into a smartwatch or even an iPhone. Apple is also reportedly developing a blood pressure monitoring feature for the Apple Watch Bloombergalthough it’s unclear when or if such technology will be released.
September period Interviewed by CNETDeidre Caldbeck, Apple’s senior director of Apple Watch and health product marketing, said health and wellness were the primary use cases for Apple Watch in the early days.
“Even after a short period of time, we started hearing from users noticing things about their health and fitness that they might not have noticed before,” she said. “So we started pulling on those leads.”
In the near future, we may see health apps included with smartwatches and other wearable devices that focus more on nutrition and food logging. Food logging apps are nothing new, but the focus on more holistic health in major smartwatches and smart rings means we could see a renewed interest in the space. Additionally, if AI health chatbots are to be truly useful, it will be important to understand nutrition in addition to activity, sleep patterns, and body changes.
Oura Recently entered into a partnership A partnership with glucose monitoring giant Dexcom enables the two companies’ products to work together to help provide additional insights into metabolic health, while Bloomberg Reports say Apple has tested an app to help people with prediabetes monitor their nutrition. Samsung has previously said nutrition is one of its four focus areas when it comes to health tracking, along with sleep, stress and activity.
Making watches more independent of phones remains a challenge
Health and fitness tracking remains the biggest use case for smartwatches.
For smartwatch makers, the holy grail has always been a device that stands alone from your phone so you don’t have to stare at a black rectangular screen in your pocket. Smartwatches like the Apple Watch have offered cellular connectivity for much of the past decade. But that connection is limited to slower 4G LTE speeds, which limits the wearable’s practical capabilities.
The arrival of new technologies like 5G and generative artificial intelligence means it will become harder to make watches truly self-reliant. Smartwatches don’t currently support standalone 5G connectivity, although chipmakers like Qualcomm and MediaTek is looking to change that soon with new modem chips designed to help small devices connect to 5G networks.
Canalys researcher Leathem speculates that devices running these solutions, such as MediaTek’s RedCap (reduced capacity) technology, may become available in 2025 or 2026. But even if the technology does arrive, it will still be difficult to convince consumers that cellular connectivity is possible. Worth it.
“They’re a little gimmicky,” Latham said of cellular smartwatches. “In a sense, it’s kind of cool to have them, but there’s not a clear and obvious use case that justifies the extra monthly payments.”
Generative AI is another reason why smartwatches are likely to rely on smartphones for the foreseeable future. Until AI models are small and efficient enough to run on devices as compact as smartwatches, much of the computing will rely on connected smartphones or the cloud. Gartner analyst Atwal believes tech companies may already be looking into how to shrink language models — though they may not be doing so specifically for smartwatches, but to enable AI to run on other IoT devices.
“They’re thinking, ‘Okay, how do we shrink this platform, how do we make this a smaller platform,'” he said.
Smartwatches have evolved greatly over the past decade, from basic pedometers and notification machines to powerful health monitors capable of taking readings that previously required a trip to the doctor. They will continue to move in this direction, although it will take some time for entirely new types of health metrics to reach our wrists.
In the meantime, don’t be surprised if you find yourself asking your watch or connected health apps for advice on how to sleep better or create a customized exercise routine.
“It really comes down to this,” Ramon T. Llamas, director of mobile device research at International Data Corporation, said in a previous interview with CNET. “You want to spend the rest of your time gathering descriptions. Sex data: your step history, heart rate and sleep, or want to get to the next level?”
