Posts on wearables and health devices that move diagnosis, monitoring, and treatment into everyday life.
Every published post with this tag.
As medical testing becomes software, new tests and interpretations can be bundled into phones, watches, and subscriptions. Big Tech can earn money by giving them away, putting pressure on healthcare companies that sell them. What will this mean for patients, labs, and healthcare orgs?
We’re used to software updates giving our phones new capabilities. The same thing is happening to medical tests: an ECG can reveal clues about the liver, and a mammogram can help assess heart risk. Better software is expanding what these tests can tell us — whether we take them tomorrow or took them years ago.
Epitel raised $26 million for REMI, a wireless EEG worn at home for weeks. It replaces multi-day inpatient workups at one of the country's few epilepsy monitoring units — lower resolution, but cheaper, more convenient, and longer, so it can catch seizures a three-day stay would miss. Classic Monitoring Migration. Classic disruption, too.
Signal Ring just announced a $399 ring that reads blood pressure continuously with no cuff and no need to calibrate. A first — if it works. Prompted me to look at where we are with current efforts at BP on wearables from Huawei, Samsung, Hilo, and Apple. Bottom line: no cuff-less device has been validated for continuous use, including Signal Ring.
The front door to healthcare is a funnel: it directs patients to higher-level care, where the money is. Oura and Whoop are rebuilding that front door on a consumer subscription — and the demand it absorbs never shows up in the claims data.
Correction to my previous post about the new Fitbit Air. Turns out Apple's Health app prices AI interpretation at zero — no subscription, ever. But the Fitbit Air doesn't. This leaves Apple in an unexpected position as the price leader for five years of hardware and AI interpretation — a full 40% less than Fitbit Air.
Apple has priced biometric interpretation at zero since 2015. Google joined them this week with the $99 Fitbit Air. Whoop and Oura now have to explain a five-year cost of ownership that runs seven to eighteen times higher — and the annual checkup has to explain why it still exists.
There's a number that predicts whether you'll be alive in ten years better than your blood pressure, your cholesterol, your BMI, or whether you smoke. The American Heart Association has been recommending it as a vital sign since 2016. Your doctor has almost certainly never measured it. Apple Watch measures it every time you take a brisk walk.
OpenAI and Anthropic both launched enterprise healthcare AI offerings last month. OpenAI's is more complete — a ready-to-use product for clinicians plus an API for developers. Anthropic's is developer-focused, with connectors to healthcare databases like CMS and ICD-10. Both will eventually offer the full stack. The question is what you need now.
Current AI health tools share the same flaw as traditional healthcare: they're episodic, not continuous. OpenClaw — a nerdy new tool that’s shot to 2 million users in nothing flat — shows us what comes next: AI assistants that monitor your health 24/7, cross-reference data sources, and act on your behalf without being asked.
For the last 50 years, the engine of technology innovation has been a consumer engine. Consumers have steadily accumulated new health capabilities — including diagnosis, treatment, and monitoring — much faster than healthcare organizations. This has caused a decades-old, large-scale migration of health-related activity from the healthcare system to the consumer tech system. But in my experience speaking with hundreds of healthcare CEOs and board members, these migrations remain largely invisible to healthcare leadership.
Digital coaches are taking prevention where healthcare and public health can’t reach — into daily life. Activity trackers like Apple Watch, Fitbit, and Garmin now deliver personalized, continuous feedback at global scale, turning prevention into a business that keeps people healthier — and needing healthcare less.
AI health coaches aren’t just for athletes anymore. They’re starting to handle the day-to-day interpretation, advice, and treatment adjustments that once required doctors. From glucose monitoring to hypertension management, technologies like Dexcom, Teladoc, and Omada are quietly taking over the work of routine clinical decision-making. This new generation of digital health coaches marks the next step in a long trend — technology shrinking healthcare by making us need it less.
One year after analyzing FDA’s AI medical device approvals, a new dataset confirms: growth continues, but acceleration is absent. While more young companies are joining the field, older firms like GE still dominate approvals — classic sustaining innovation. And Big Tech? Still barely on the board.
FDA approvals of AI-enabled medical devices are accelerating — but not in the way you might expect. While new startups are entering the space, the real winners remain legacy giants like GE and Siemens. An analysis of the latest FDA data reveals a classic case of sustaining innovation, not disruption, as established players integrate AI to reinforce their dominance.