Let's be honest, the Apple Watch stopped being “just a watch” a long time ago. At this point, it has morphed into a medical device that measures the vital signs and also keeps track of time and helps users pay for their oat milk matcha latte. But Apple is not the only company that understands this. Neither is Samsung or even Google.
The global wearable technology market size will reach $218.27 billion by 2024 and will balloon all the way up to $885.65 billion by 2033. And there is no way that something like that will happen solely as a result of people's desire to measure how many calories they burn through jogging.
Here's the thing, though, this is the story of the ultimate dataset ownership: your body, which has not much to do with technological gadgets.
The Hardware Race Is Just Getting Started
In 2024, Samsung introduced the Galaxy Ring. For years, Apple has been the dominant brand in wearables, claiming more than 19% of the global wearable market. Now Samsung wants its slice of the pie and Google, through its Fitbit acquisition, has been slowly constructing its health data ecosystem for years. Huawei and Xiaomi are also in this conversation and in Q1 2025, Huawei surpassed Apple for the first time ever in the global wrist wearables market, grabbing over 20% share. The "established giant is being besieged" is not a headline, it's the reality.
At the center of all this is a pretty simple idea: the next major computing device may not be your phone, but something you wear instead. Smartphones already feel close to peak maturity. It becomes difficult to innovate within a given design paradigm after a certain point. But, to create a product that informs an individual about their resting heart rate, sleep patterns, stress level, blood oxygen and ultimately, their blood glucose level, in real time, continuously, without even the use of a needle, that represents a new ballgame entirely.
Glucose, specifically, represents an area of intense focus that both Apple and Samsung have been working on for years. As of 2026, there is still no smartwatch or smart ring that has received non-invasive glucose monitoring clearance by the FDA. But the Apple Watch Series 11 is capable of displaying glucose readings from a different sensor such as the Dexcom G7. Similarly, Samsung also offered an idea along similar lines, leveraging sensors that use light and machine learning algorithms to translate this data into glucose readings. It should be noted that obtaining FDA approval here will be difficult due to the clinical nature of the measurement. But once that happens, it's a game changer for wearables.
The Subscription Economy of Your Own Health
There's another layer to this that doesn't get talked about enough is the underlying business model. Hardware is only the gateway into this market, the money is made afterwards by selling data-based services and subscriptions.
For example, Oura requires a $5.99 monthly subscription simply to look at the results of your personal data. While Whoop has built a subscription model right at the core of its value proposition, in early 2024, the company successfully raised $200 million. Finally, Apple Fitness+ is only available through a paid subscription and Samsung Health, on the other hand, is free for now but who knows for how long.
This model makes sense when you think about it. As you feed your wearables more information about yourself, they become more and more valuable to you. Your wearables need the cloud to process the data you provide, and the cloud costs money. So, the company takes your payment each month for insights gained using information from your own body. Nice, circular logic, isn't it? And, let's face it, nobody really questions it since the insights provided are actually helpful. Being told by Oura that your readiness score is low before you got out of bed might seem quite eerie after just a couple of weeks. It is not magic, it is simply machine learning based on your data.
The strategy employed by Samsung was to enter the area of home-based healthcare, targeting the aging population with its willingness to monitor its health at home due to rising healthcare costs. It's a smart play. The population aged 65+ will have both the health monitoring needs and the ability and willingness to pay for such services. Even Apple managed to get hearing aid functionality into its AirPods Pro 2 in 2024 as approved by the FDA. These companies are no longer positioning themselves as consumer electronics brands but rather as healthcare providers. Just without the regulatory overhead of being healthcare companies.
What Exactly Happens to Your Body Data
This is the part that makes me a little uneasy, not going to lie. When you scroll past a terms and conditions page to set up your shiny new smart ring or smartwatch, you're consenting to a lot. According to a 2025 vpnMentor survey analyzing 117 wearable gadgets from 33 leading brands, almost 90% of those products measure health and wellbeing parameters, 63% track location data and 23% of leading companies actually transmit or sell private information to marketers and third parties.
Apple, credit where it's due, only shares any health data upon user consent and has one of the most robust default privacy policies in the industry. While Google is legally bound not to share Fitbit data with ad profiles and systems for 10 years, extending through at least 2030, in accordance with an EU decision.
The Health Information Privacy Reform Act, which seeks to extend the same level of protection as the HIPAA Act on consumer health data, was presented by Senator Bill Cassidy on November 13th, 2025. The bill was never approved. Issues of wearables data privacy continue to escalate due to the breach that occurred in 2021 through the third party syncing application, affecting up to 61 million Fitbit and Apple Watch users.
Another point worth mentioning is that since the constitutional right to abortion was stripped away in the United States following the 2022 Dobbs decision, many women started asking questions about their menstrual cycle data. Is it stored somewhere? Who has access to it? Is it subject to subpoenas? These are not paranoid questions because such data is outside the scope of HIPPA and is stored privately in servers you know nothing about.
Lastly, after the Supreme Court ruling in favor of Dobbs v Jackson Women's Health Organization case in 2022, women all over the United States started wondering where their menstrual data is stored, who has access to it, and whether it can be used as a way of proving abortion if the user chooses to hide their pregnancy from their family members.
The AI Layer Changes Everything
All major wearable brands are currently utilizing AI to process health data and this is what lies ahead in the future.
At the moment, Oura makes use of AI in analyzing photos and metabolic trends to track your meals. Samsung has also created connections between the health data available within its Galaxy Ring and Watch products. Apple is constantly making improvements in pattern detection in the Health app.
The more data such systems have, the better recommendations they can provide. What is especially interesting is that this data is extremely valuable for the companies. Heart rate, sleep patterns, physical activity levels, temperature, stress and glucose data obtained from millions of users allow creating health AI-based solutions, which would be impossible for conventional healthcare systems.
In 2024, about 29% of consumers globally had wearable devices and health tracking was the most common reason for purchasing them. Every night of data collected and each workout contributes to systems, which should give more insights about individuals in the long run.
Where This Is Actually Going
The wearable healthcare market was valued at $70.4 billion in 2024 and is projected to grow to nearly $380 billion by 2035.
Next-generation sensors are already under development and they go beyond continuous blood pressure monitoring. Companies are working on dehydration detection, illness tracking and instant stress assessment sensors. At CES 2025, Withings presented OMNIA, a conceptual smart mirror that evaluates the vital parameters of users and their lung performance. Ultrahuman launched a $2,000 luxury smart ring targeting what they call the "biohacker" market.
The part that I find genuinely fascinating is the fact that wearable health technology is not limited to fitness products but finds application in actual health use-cases like continuous glucose monitoring, alerting on atrial fibrillation and detecting sleep apnea.
These companies rely on the belief that personal health data will be one of the most valuable assets in technology within the next decade, considering the growth in the wearable market and continuous advancement in sensor technology.
So What Does This Mean for You
Honestly? A lot depends on what you're comfortable with. If you currently own a wearable, it might not hurt to take a peek at the privacy policy, especially where data collection and sharing with third parties is concerned. Some companies even give users the option to limit some kinds of data collection on their devices but usually don't make it very easy to do so. In the US, proposed laws like the Health Information Privacy Reform Act will surely determine how this data will be regulated in the future.
As technology advances, sensors become smaller, cheaper and more precise and the algorithms are trained to recognize correlations between sleep, heart rate, levels of stress, physical activity and metabolic processes over time.
And that's the bigger picture here. Billions of dollars are invested in R&D by companies because the constant flow of health information is becoming increasingly valuable. That doesn't mean wearable tech is bad. A lot of it is genuinely useful, but it does mean people should pay more attention to what they're agreeing to when they connect these devices to their lives.
