How wearable devices are slowly turning into personal health coaches in 2025

On a recent Monday afternoon, it opened Ora app on my phone and asked a simple question: “I’m tired even though I got enough sleep last night. What should I do?”

He suggested I walk, stretch, or hydrate in order to increase my energy levels.

The chatbot from Oura, which makes smart rings that measure sleep, heart rate, skin temperature and other metrics, immediately responded with a reminder that quality is just as important as quantity when it comes to sleep. He sleeps. The AI-powered coach inside the Oura app was able to rely on all the data that Oura’s algorithms were processing behind the scenes to give me advice based on my habits.

Interactions like these are a harbinger of where Smart watch Where the industry is headed in 2025 and beyond. Smartwatches are poised to get better at interpreting health metrics, connecting the dots between our biometric data points, and turning those trends into actionable insights rather than just a dashboard display of statistics. Samsung and Google It took steps in this direction in 2024 by launching new AI-powered tools in its health apps to provide deeper insights into your health data.

Meanwhile, fitness remains the primary use case for wearables, e.g Electronic marketer In his 2023 report, AI is playing an increasingly larger role on phones and computers – opening up new ways to manage tasks and handle and interpret data both on the device and in the cloud. And it’s this intersection where health trackers and AI processing meet that could lead to smarter health companions on our wrists, fingers, eyes and ears.

“Continuous health monitoring, early detection, prevention, personalization of healthcare, that’s where it’s all headed,” said Ranjit Atwal, research director on Gartner’s Quantitative Innovation team. “So you get information tailored to you and your context.”

Read more: Don’t buy a new smartwatch without asking yourself these questions

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 investments in artificial intelligence, which companies are leveraging to generate more valuable insights and make health data more understandable.

Instead of analyzing through tables and graphs showing your sleep patterns or exercise data, why not do this Fitbit Create a custom chart based on your question? 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 some types of… Health data through Siri On Series 9 and later models. Samsung has also launched a new classification called Energy pointswhich combines different sleep and activity metrics to provide quick information about your current state, just like the standby scores from Oura and Fitbit.

Jack Lethem, a research analyst at Canalys, points to smart rings like Oura and Zepp, the health app that works with Amazfit smartwatches, as two particularly advanced examples when it comes to health coaching and insights.

“They’re actually driving a lot of innovation in the smartwatch areas,” Lethem said, referring to smart rings like the Oura Ring. “And sellers need to catch up.”

Apple and Samsung may have plans to develop their own full-fledged health chatbots in the future. Apple is reportedly working on a digital health coach that would provide health and lifestyle recommendations based on AI and Apple Watch data, according to the British newspaper “Daily Mail”. Bloomberg. Samsung tested a digital health coach that uses large language models to provide health insights based on their habits, such as whether a user sleeps better after exercising. CNET reported In June.

Features like these will become increasingly important as household names like Apple, Samsung, and Google’s Fitbit face additional competition from smart rings like the Oura and cheaper wearables, like those made by Amazfit. Samsung, for example, launched its first smart ring in 2024 as a health-tracking alternative for those who want a more premium, less distracting device.

But bringing additional AI-driven features to smartwatches is particularly challenging given the small size of these devices. They lack the computing power needed to process large amounts of data on the device. 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 full of new AI-powered software tricks and tools. For example, Apple Intelligence is available on iPhone, iPad, and Mac, but not on Apple Watch.

“Because of the nature of generative AI, you need the cloud or another processing unit to do the processing,” said David McQueen, research director at ABI Research. “I don’t think smart watches have that capability yet.”

It’s a fact acknowledged by Google, which runs the Wear OS software that powers many Android-compatible smartwatches in addition to selling its own Pixel watches. when he asked in May Whether or not it will be possible to release a version of Google’s Gemini model that can run on Wear OS smartwatches remains to be seen, but doing so will likely “take some time,” said Bjorn Kilburn, vice president of Wear OS and Android Health at Google.

There are still more dramatic changes to come

The most interesting changes in smartwatches seem to be happening on the software side. In terms of hardware, we can likely expect routine upgrades such as new processors, new band modes, and improved durability.

“In the end, it probably would have actually made things better and more accurate,” McQueen said.

Tech giants like Apple and Samsung are taking additional advantage of the sensors already in their smartwatches, as evidenced by the new watch. Detection of sleep apnea Features launched by the two companies this year. Apple, for example, is leveraging the Apple Watch’s accelerometer to detect subtle movements associated with difficulty breathing.

Certain Samsung Galaxy Watch models outside the US Support blood pressure readings When calibrated with a cuff-based monitor, this is another indication that smartwatches are indeed continuing to evolve into more advanced health monitors.

But current devices and sensors have their limitations. The ambitious goal of using smartwatches to measure blood sugar changes, which Apple has reportedly been working on for years, will likely not be achieved anytime soon. Bloomberg Reports suggest that such a device is still years away since Apple has struggled to make the technology small enough to fit a smartwatch — or even an iPhone. Apple is also reportedly working on blood pressure monitoring capabilities for the Apple Watch Bloombergalthough it is unclear when or if this technology will be released.

During the month of September Interview with CNETHealth and wellness emerged as a key use case for Apple Watch early on, said Deidre Caldbeck, senior director of Apple Watch and Health Marketing at Apple.

“Even after a short period of time, we started hearing from users who noticed things about their health and fitness that they may not have noticed before,” she said. “So we started pulling those strings.”

In the near term, we will likely see a greater focus on nutrition and food logging in health apps that accompany smartwatches and other wearable devices. Food logging apps aren’t new, but the focus on more holistic health among the major smartwatches and smart rings means we could see renewed interest in this space. Additionally, if AI health chatbots become truly useful, having a window into nutrition as well as activity, sleep patterns, and physical changes will be important.

Ora Recently entered into a partnership With glucose monitoring giant Dexcom to enable the companies’ products to work together to help provide more insights into metabolic health, while Bloomberg Reports that Apple has tested an application to help diabetics monitor their nutrition. Samsung has previously said that nutrition is one of the four main focus areas when it comes to tracking health, along with sleep, stress, and activity.

Making watches more independent from your phone is still a challenge

For smartwatch makers, the holy grail has always been a device that’s independent of your phone, freeing you from constantly looking at the rectangular black screen stored in your pocket. Cellular connectivity has been available on smartwatches like the Apple Watch for much of the past decade. But that connectivity is limited to slower 4G LTE speeds which limits what the wearable can actually do.

The arrival of newer technologies, such as 5G and generative AI, means that making watches truly self-reliant will be more difficult. Smartwatches don’t currently support standalone 5G connectivity, although chipmakers would love to Qualcomm and mediatek The company is looking to change that soon with new modem chips designed to help small devices connect to 5G networks.

Lethem, the Canalys researcher, expects that devices powered by these solutions, such as MediaTek’s RedCap (low-capacity) technology, could arrive in 2025 or 2026. But even when the technology arrives, it may still be difficult to convince consumers that cellular connectivity exists. Worth it.

“It’s kind of weird,” Lethem said of cellular smartwatches. “Meaning, it’s nice to have, but there’s no clear, obvious use case that justifies the extra monthly payment.”

Generative AI is another reason why smartwatches will depend on smartphones for the foreseeable future. Until AI models are small and efficient enough to run on a compact device like a smartwatch, much computing will depend on tethered smartphones or the cloud. Atwal, the Gartner analyst, believes technology companies are likely already looking at how to pare down language models — though they may not do so for smartwatches specifically but to enable AI to run on additional IoT devices in general.

“They’re thinking: ‘Okay, how do we reduce the size of this, how do we make this platform a smaller platform,'” he said.

Smartwatches have evolved a lot over the past decade, from basic step counters and notification devices to powerful health monitors capable of taking readings that previously required a visit to the doctor. They will continue to move in this direction, although it will take some time before entirely new types of health metrics reach our wrists.

In the meantime, don’t be surprised if you find yourself asking your watch or connected health app for tips on how to sleep better or build a personalized workout routine.

“It really comes down to this,” Ramon T. Llamas, research director at International Data Corporation covering mobile devices, said in a previous interview with CNET. “Do you want to spend the rest of your time collecting just metadata: your step history, heart rate, and sleep history, or do you want to move on to the next stage?”