Wearables Are No Longer Just Watches
It feels like barely a day passes without another headline about the wearable market and everybody is already anticipating news about a next move by the big players in that space or new market entrants.
From the outside, it looks like the whole category revolves around wrists and fingers.
But then — occasionally — you read stories about flatulence-tracking underwear, intravaginal fertility trackers, or ingestable capsules that are able to record their journey through your intestines.
That is when you realize that the category is supposedly much broader — and interesting — than the headlines suggest.
Wearables, and increasingly nearables, are no longer just consumer gadgets. Beyond consumer use, they have become important, and in some cases irreplaceable, medical tools: for glucose monitoring, cardiac rhythm tracking, sleep diagnostics, seizure detection, remote patient monitoring, pregnancy care, rehabilitation, insulin delivery, and neuromodulation.
They are becoming a broader layer of body-data infrastructure: devices worn on the body, placed near the body, or even used inside the body to measure, interpret, and sometimes act on physiological, behavioral, environmental, and therapeutic signals.
In the new Wearables & Nearables Explorer, we mapped 136 products from 123 companies across 11 wearable categories, that track more than 200 biomarkers and signals. The result is a clearer view of where the body, and the environment around it, are becoming measurable.
Wearables vs. Nearables
In our map, we didn't stop at wearables — devices worn on or in the body — but also included nearables — sensing devices that are not worn, but still capture body-adjacent or health-relevant signals from the surrounding environment. Examples include under-mattress sleep sensors, room-based monitoring, personal air-quality monitors, and environmental exposure devices.
Nearables can make health data more passive and more contextual at the same time. Sleep quality may depend on temperature, noise, light, air quality, and breathing patterns. Metabolic signals may be shaped by meals, movement, stress, and environment. Recovery looks different at home, at work, while traveling, or during training.
The broader trend that we see emerging here: health measurement is becoming more ambient. Not every useful signal will require a device strapped to the body. Some data will come from rooms, beds, clothing, utensils, cars. The future of measurement may be less about asking people to track everything manually, and more about building environments that help explain the conditions around health. By integrating context, many biomarkers become much more useful.
Where The Map Is Densest
If we use product entries as a proxy for market activity, the current map is densest in five areas: metabolic and biochemical wearables, cardiovascular and clinical monitoring, mainstream health and fitness, femtech and reproductive devices, and therapeutic or drug-delivery systems.
The largest category is metabolic and biochemical wearables, with 24 entries. This is where the field moves beyond basic activity and vital-sign tracking into chemistry, metabolism, nutrition response, hydration, and molecular monitoring. CGMs are still the anchor, but the broader direction is clear: more biochemical sensing, more continuous metabolic context, and more attempts to translate molecular signals into everyday decisions.
Cardiovascular and clinical monitoring follows with 22 entries. This is one of the most mature parts of the market. Here, wearables are already moving beyond wellness into regulated workflows, clinical follow-up, home-based monitoring, and disease-specific use cases.
Mainstream health and fitness wearables remain a major cluster, with 18 entries. This category is less exotic, but important because it sets consumer expectations for continuous tracking: sleep, recovery, activity, heart rate, HRV, temperature, SpO2, and related features have become familiar entry points into body-data products.
Femtech and reproductive wearables account for 15 entries and are among the most diverse categories. They cover fertility, pregnancy, pelvic-floor health, lactation, menstrual tracking, hormone-related signals, and menopause-adjacent use cases. These products make visible a set of signals that have historically been undermeasured.
Therapeutic, drug-delivery, and augmentation wearables include 14 entries. This category matters because it shifts the frame from sensing to action. These products do not simply observe the body. They intervene, stimulate, assist, deliver therapy, or provide feedback.
Biomarkers And Signals Are Not The Same Thing
Across the database, we track more than 200 distinct biomarkers and signals. Some are familiar physiological measures: heart rate, ECG waveform, glucose, SpO2, respiratory rate, skin temperature, blood pressure, cortisol, lactate, and body temperature.
Others are not biomarkers in the strict biological sense, but still matter for wearable health data. These include gait disruptions, eating speed, cup fill level, insulin delivery events, haptic feedback, camera images, sleep-stage classification, therapy response, and device-control signals.
That distinction is important. A wearable that measures glucose is different from one that detects eating behavior. A device that records an ECG waveform is different from one that infers stress from a composite score.
Nearables expand the signal set further by capturing context around the body: sleep environment, air quality, noise exposure, temperature, humidity, radon concentrations, particulate matter, or volatile organic compounds (VOCs).
What we observe is that wearables are moving from single-marker tracking toward context-rich models of the body. A glucose value becomes much more useful when it is connected to meals, sleep, stress, movement, medication, and recovery. A sleep score makes more sense when it is connected to room temperature, breathing, alcohol, menstrual cycle, training load, and light exposure.
That is also where the white space is. Many important health states are still poorly captured in daily life. Some of these may become measurable through better biochemical sensors. Others may require pattern recognition across multiple weaker signals rather than one perfect biomarker.
For users, the opportunity is not more dashboards. It is better context: understanding why a signal changed, whether it matters, and what to do next. For manufacturers, the opportunity is not simply adding more sensors, but building systems that combine sensing, validation, interpretation, and action into a coherent health loop.
The next frontier is about connecting the right signals into decisions that are actually useful.
What To Watch Next
Sensors are becoming smaller, cheaper, lower-power, more continuous, and more closely matched to the body location where a signal actually exists.
The trend is not simply “smaller wearables.” It is better form-factor fit. The most interesting products are often those where the form factor is not decorative, but functional: it gives the sensor access to a signal that a smartwatch cannot see well.
But the most important area to watch is not the next sensor technology, but the layer above the sensors.
As wearables and nearables multiply, users will not want ten separate dashboards, ten readiness scores, and ten different explanations of their body. The real value will come from systems that integrate data across devices, apps, labs, calendars, nutrition, sleep, exercise, environment, and medical context, then translate that into a coherent view of what is happening and what to do next.
Early examples are already emerging. Bevel positions itself as a connected health coach that combines wearables, bloodwork, and lifestyle data into recommendations. Vora describes itself as an AI health operating system, connecting wearables, calendars, nutrition, recovery, and training into adaptive daily plans. Oura Advisor, WHOOP Advanced Labs, Garmin Connect+, and Google Health Coach show that major device ecosystems are also moving from tracking toward interpretation, coaching, and integrated guidance. On the infrastructure side, data-network layers are emerging that help product developers and consumers intregrate wearable devices and data from other data sources. Examples here are: Terra, Validic, Human API or Evidation.
The hard part is that this layer also has the highest trust burden. Bad interpretation is worse than no interpretation. The winners will need strong data access, careful validation, privacy protection, and explainability — and provide behavioural nudges that are followed without becoming coercive, anxiety-inducing, or overly prescriptive.
The Geography Of Wearables
The company map is still heavily concentrated in the United States. In the current database, just over half of the mapped companies, brands, and research teams are headquartered there.
But the field is not purely U.S.-centric. The Explorer now spans 20 HQ countries, showing that wearables and nearables are developing across several regional ecosystems rather than from one dominant geography alone.
That matters because this is not one single market. Consumer health, regulated medical devices, sports performance, women’s health, sleep, environmental exposure, rehabilitation, and therapeutic systems each follow different commercial, regulatory, and clinical paths. The global map helps show where those different centers of gravity are forming, and where specialized body-data companies may emerge next.
The Business Model Is Changing Too
As wearables and nearables move closer to intimate health data, trust becomes part of the product. A step count is one thing. Other signals reveal much more sensitive information that needs proper handling and protection.
That changes what users should expect from companies. Who owns the data? Who can access it? Can it be shared with insurers, employers, clinics, researchers, device partners, or AI platforms? Can users delete it, export it, or even benefit from contributing it?
For companies, the device is increasingly only the entry point. The recurring value sits in subscriptions, monitoring, coaching, diagnostics, clinical workflows, data infrastructure, companion layers for drugs and therapies, and the longitudinal data they keep accumulating over time.
The tension is obvious. Companies may want users to measure more, subscribe longer, and stay inside proprietary ecosystems. Clinicians may want continuous data, but not every signal is actionable. Users may want insight without surrendering control.
Conclusion
Wearables and nearables are no longer a single product category. They are becoming a set of sensing, feedback, and intervention systems distributed across the body and its surroundings: on the wrist, skin, finger, foot, ear, eye, mouth, abdomen, inside the gut, under the mattress, and in the environment around us.
But the future of wearables will not be decided by measurement alone. It will depend on interpretation, validation, trust, privacy, and integration into the broader health journey. A signal only becomes useful when it helps someone understand what is happening, make a better decision, or receive better care.
That is the real challenge ahead: turning continuous data into meaningful context without creating more noise, anxiety, or false precision.
There is also a philosophical question underneath the category. If more of the body becomes continuously measurable, what kind of relationship do people develop with themselves? Wearables can help people notice patterns they would otherwise miss. They can also make the body feel like a system that is always under inspection.
We built the Masters of Longevity Wearables Explorer to make that landscape easier to navigate. Use it to explore the company map, product list, category overview, and biomarker and signal catalogue.