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Wellness trackers attract the already well
A huge market
That finding comes from a researcher who has been studying people who use wearables. It sits inside a very large market: about half of Americans own a device that tracks their health in some way, and analysts put the wearables business near $100 billion. Oura and Whoop are valued in the many billions and could go public.
From steps to scores
The first wave counted steps. Fitbit made 10,000 a day a common topic of conversation, and the newer devices score sleep, grade workouts in detail, and increasingly offer AI-fueled advice on what to do next.
Real breakthroughs
Some wearables have also produced real breakthroughs, including in identifying early-onset Parkinson's and conditions related to the heart.
Where did 10,000 steps come from?
The figure traces to a 1965 Japanese pedometer called the Manpo-kei, which translates to 10,000 steps meter, sold by the company Yamasa. It was a marketing name rather than the result of a trial. A 2019 study by I-Min Lee and colleagues in JAMA Internal Medicine followed 16,741 older women and found that death rates fell as steps rose, leveling off around 7,500 a day.
How can a watch signal early Parkinson's?
A 2023 study in Nature Medicine by Ann-Kathrin Schalkamp and colleagues used a week of wrist accelerometer data from about 103,000 UK Biobank participants. Their model picked out people who would later be diagnosed with Parkinson's disease, in some cases up to seven years before diagnosis. The signal came from changes in how people moved.
How do wearables detect heart rhythm problems?
Optical sensors pick up the pulse, and software flags irregular intervals that can point to atrial fibrillation. In the Apple Heart Study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2019, researchers at Stanford enrolled 419,297 participants. Only 0.52 percent of them received an irregular pulse notification.