As wearable technology becomes increasingly sophisticated—not to mention increasingly embedded in how we think about our health—at what point does all this monitoring stop helping you and start just generating noise?
Oura Ring 4 $349.00 at Amazon Shop Now Shop Now $349.00 at AmazonDo you need multiple fitness wearables?
Many multi-device users are simply patching up all these gaps, always trying to use the best tool for each job. So if you’re into tracking your health, a multi-device setup sounds reasonable enough. Surely more inputs mean better data?
Zooming out, it’s worth noting that most consumer wearables are not medical-grade devices. And this is not to say that your smartwatches, rings, and bands aren’t legit. Far from it: The FDA has cleared several Apple Watch features as Class II medical devices. What's important to understand is that designation applies to specific, well-validated features, and not to the broad range of metrics you might get on a daily basis.
Instead, your smartwatch is best used for detecting trends over time—not to give you clinically accurate measurements at any given moment. This difference matters when people start making health decisions based on their at-home tracking.
Whoop 5.0 $359.00 at Amazon Shop Now Shop Now $359.00 at AmazonThen there's everything else. Stress scores are a prime example of a metric that sounds sophisticated but is built on shaky interpretive ground. They're typically derived from HRV and heart rate—real physiological signals—but the "stress" label layered on top is not directly measuring your mental state at that moment. The same skepticism applies to things like "readiness scores" and "body battery" metrics. "They can be directionally useful," Mitchell says, "but they're likely not telling you anything your body isn't already telling you if you pay attention to it."
Keep these risks in mind with fitness wearables
Mental health is another risk. For instance, there's a documented phenomenon called "orthosomnia"—a term for when people become so focused on optimizing their sleep scores that the monitoring itself begins to disrupt their sleep. More broadly, constant tracking can erode a person's connection to their own body. "Constant tracking can shift you from listening to your body to only trusting what the device says," Mitchell says. People can become fixated on day-to-day metrics that, on any given day, may not be fully accurate. "Focusing on trends over time is a much better way of using the data, and listening to your body is always better."
Who fitness wearables are actually good for
Again, none of this means wearables are without value. Training for an endurance event and wanting to track recovery is a strong use case. Managing a chronic condition with physician guidance is another. Identifying patterns around sleep disruption or cardiac irregularities is genuinely, clinically meaningful. And for people who simply enjoy engaging with their data, without it causing anxiety, that's a legitimate use case too.
For people without a specific medical concern or athletic goal, these questions are worth sitting with:
If you skip checking your stats for a week, does anything bad actually happen?
"For healthy people with no specific goals, the return on investment for most wearables is pretty modest," he says. "If you're sleeping fine, exercising regularly, and your doctor isn't flagging concerns, you're probably getting more anxiety than insight from layering on more devices."
If you're wearing two or three devices simultaneously and struggling to articulate what each one is telling you that the others aren't … that's probably your answer. Consider taking a week off from using your wearables. If you feel lost without your devices, that's worth reflecting on. At the end of the day, collecting data and acting on data are very different things.
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