Last week, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced the agency was launching a campaign to encourage all Americans to use wearables to track health metrics.
Wearables come in the form of watches, bands, rings, patches and clothes that can be used for a variety of reasons including monitoring glucose levels, measuring activity levels, track heart health and observe sleeping patterns.
“It’s a way … people can take control over their own heath. They can take responsibility,” Kennedy said during a hearing of the House Subcommittee on Health. “They can see, as you know, what food is doing to their glucose levels, their heart rates and a number of other metrics as they eat it. and they can begin to make good judgments about their diet, about their physical activity, about the way that they live their lives.”
He went on, “We think that wearables are a key to the MAHA agenda — Making America Healthy Again. My vision is that every American is wearing a wearable within four years.”
Digital medicine experts told ABC News that wearables do have benefits and can be used to motivate someone to increase physical activity, which could reduce the risk of poor health outcomes.
However, they said not everybody needs to have a wearable and there are some potential risks including data breaches.
A Fitbit Charge 5 smart fitness tracker wearable is used to take an ECG reading in Lafayette, Calif., March 15, 2022.
Gado via Getty Images
Nabil Alshurafa, an associate professor in the department of preventive medicine and the department of electrical and computer engineering at Northwestern University in Illinois, said wearables were born out of the quantified self movement.
This is a movement that endorses using technology to track and analyze personal data for learning and improvement.
“Just the way when we’re driving a vehicle, we see whether we’re low on gas, and then we pass by the gas station and repump,” Alshurafa told ABC News. “So, the idea was sort of can I see when I’m active? Not active? Can I see when I have poor health habits and then adjust accordingly. Did I have good quality asleep last night? If not, let me try to improve that.”
He said there are benefits to wearables, mostly in the form of motivation to change behaviors.
A July 2022 study found wearables can empower patients and help with diagnosing conditions, changing behaviors and self-monitoring.
Additionally, a July 2019 study from the University of Florida in Gainesville found wearable devices can motivate and accelerate physical activity, although it did not find consistent improvement in health outcomes.
Dr. David McManus, chair and professor of medicine at UMass Chan Medical School and a digital medicine expert, said an example would be if someone wants to walk 10,000 steps a day and they wear an activity monitor that tells them they only walked 5,000 steps on a particular day. This might motivate that person to walk further to achieve their goal.
In turn, evidence shows people who are more physically active have fewer rates of heart attacks and are less likely to develop high blood pressure or obesity.
“The benefit would be if a person actually used that information to change their behavior,” he told ABC News. “That would be the clearest use case of a person using a wearable to learn. … I won’t say there’s convincing concrete evidence that a wearable will prevent heart attacks — I would be uncomfortable saying that — but I do think it’s reasonable on the basis of preliminary studies and observational studies, there is some potential benefit for certain types of people from wearing devices to get people motivated to change.”
Alshurafa said clinicians can also receive more granular data about behaviors such as how much energy patients are expending and how many calories they are burning.
It’s unclear if Kennedy’s connections have played a role in his endorsements of wearables. U.S. surgeon general nominee Casey Means co-founded Levels, an app that allows people to track their food, along with biometric data like sleep and glucose monitoring, to see how their diet is impacting their health.
Additionally, her brother, Calley Means — an adviser to Kennedy — has a company that could benefit from more wearables in the world. His company, TruMed, allows people to use funds from Health Savings Accounts towards health products, such as fitness tracker watches.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., speaks before Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump at a campaign event, Nov. 1, 2024, in Milwaukee.
Morry Gash/AP, FILE
There are also drawbacks. McManus said there is not a high level of evidence that shows wearables have benefits over the long term.
“One thing I’ve learned as a physician and researcher is it’s really hard to get people to change their habits,” he said. “So it’s not so much that the sensors don’t work, and it’s not so much that they’re inaccurate — because there is plenty of data that shows that wearable devices can present really good, high-quality data — but the missing link in the chain of wearables to good health is getting people to actually get off their couch and go be more active when they have a wearable them that they’ve been on the couch.”
There are also privacy concerns because of the substantial amounts of data that wearables generate, as well as the potential for misuse.
McManus said if a database gets hacked, the data could be compromised and potentially used by a bad actor to steal additional personal information.
“The more data that’s generated, the greater the risk,” he said.
Authors of a JAMA Viewpoint article in 2019 said another risk is that data could be used against policyholders with higher premiums or to deny insurance.
Because wearables collect health information such as weight, calorie intake and blood pressure, insurance companies could use the data to increase costs, the authors said.
Alshurafa said not everyone needs to wear a wearable and it depends on the patient’s condition and what they hope to achieve.
“We feel once their health improves, we then wean them off it,” he said. “So, this notion that someone has to wear a wearable constantly — well, I mean once the problem is solved, then hopefully there’s no need for it.”
