From Apple Watches to Oura Rings: Inside the Wearable Health Boom
Illustrated by Renee Xia
“Hold on, let me record this on Strava”.
It’s something I often say when going for a walk, run, or practice while using my Apple Watch to track it. Getting 10,000 steps a day is certainly a healthy habit, but what about the urge to check my Apple Watch dozens of times throughout the day? This is just one example of how self-tracking through wearable technology has become embedded in our lifestyle. The wearable tech industry has rapidly evolved from basic fitness trackers into a defining part of modern wellness culture, where consumers increasingly rely on monitoring activity, sleep, and recovery as part of their identity and lifestyle.
Over the past decade, devices such as smart watches, fitness trackers, and smart rings have expanded from niche technologies for elite athletes into mainstream consumer products. This industry has exploded in popularity for the everyday consumer, fitness enthusiasts, and, of course, the elite athletes. Approximately 37% of U.S. adults own a smartwatch, demonstrating how wearable technology has become integrated into everyday life. Devices such as the Apple Watch, WHOOP, and Oura Ring offer a convenient way to monitor sleep, steps, recovery, and other health metrics. Their popularity has exploded alongside growing social media fitness trends, online wellness communities, and increasing emphasis on personalized health tracking in recent years. As these devices become more sophisticated and accessible, health and fitness are increasingly tied to personal identity. While in many ways, fitness tracking is positive, wearables raise the question of whether this technology is changing mental and physical wellbeing for better or for worse.
Wearable Technology as Part of Modern Wellness Culture
Wearable technology has become deeply embedded within modern wellness culture, where health and fitness are no longer viewed as hobbies, but part of an individual’s identity. Devices such as the Apple Watch, Oura Ring, and WHOOP have evolved beyond basic tracking tools into lifestyle products that represent productivity and an idealized lifestyle. While traditional watches have long represented status, smartwatches combine that social appeal with health-tracking features, allowing users to express both style and a wellness-oriented lifestyle.
A major factor contributing to this cultural shift is social media, which makes fitness visible and performative. Social media platforms and fitness influencers encourage individuals to share their achievements, creating pressure to maintain a fit image and keep up with others. However, this idealized version of fitness does not always reflect reality, as influencers often share curated content that can create unrealistic expectations surrounding their habits and lifestyles. While social media is an influential tool for promoting a healthy lifestyle, it can also contribute to misinformation surrounding exercise and nutrition, and false images. As a result, its influence may not always encourage sustainable health behaviours.
Within sports and fitness, wearable technology has become an essential tool for athletes through providing personalized insights into performance, recovery, and training. Beyond data, wearables have encouraged the idea that health metrics should be continuously measured and displayed. This constant self-tracking can create addictive monitoring behaviours and cause detrimental effects to mental wellbeing such as body dissatisfaction and weight loss behaviours, defeating the point of wearables themselves. Therefore, wearable technology represents not only a technological revolution but also a cultural shift in how individuals understand their bodies and health.
The Growth and Success of Wearable Technology
Personalized, user-centric healthcare has become a major phenomenon because wearable technologies have transformed health from something reactive into something continuously monitored and optimized. The success of devices such as the Oura ring, which surpassed $5.2 billion valuation within a decade, reflects how effectively health technology companies have marketed the idea that individuals can take control of their own well-being through data. Rather than a device that simply tracks health information, businesses strategically present wearables as tools that allow individuals to better understand their bodies and optimize their health.
A key part of this appeal is self-knowledge. Feedback provided on sleep, activity and stress is marketed to lead to a healthier, more productive and happier individual. Think of wearables as replacing the role historically played by weight scales. Both provide the promise of agency, creating the perception that users can better understand and control their bodies. However, this heavily encourages the belief that every aspect of life can and should be measured.
The success of wearable technology also relies on engagement strategies. Features such as daily goals, activity streaks, notifications, and visual rewards are designed to motivate users through self-monitoring, social influence, and enjoyable interactions. Additionally, businesses often provide aesthetic representations of physical activity, such as FitBit’s small virtual flower that grows and shrinks for breathing exercise. All of these features increase enjoyment and motivation to use the wearable. While these systems can encourage healthier behaviours, they can also create dependence on metrics through an addictive engagement system. Wearable technologies are positioned as preventative solutions to health issues, while appealing to a broad audience during the wellness boom. Due to strategic marketing, wearable tech has become adopted by not only elite athletes, but fitness enthusiasts and the general population.
The Negative Effects of Wearable Tech: Quantified-Self Dependence
As wearable technologies have become embedded into wellness culture, many users have become dependent on wearable technology to understand their bodies rather than relying on bodily intuition. Researchers refer to this phenomenon as quantified-self dependence, defined as “an excessive reliance on tracking devices” and characterized by an increase in tracker-related thoughts and decreased motivation to stay active when the tracker is not involved. As a result, users may begin to exercise not because they enjoy the activity itself, but because they want to record and measure it. For example, individuals may become motivated to go for walks primarily to meet daily fitness goals rather than for personal enjoyment. This dependence is fostered by gamification features offered by wearables, such as daily goals, streaks, and recovery scores. Liu and Chen emphasize that these features shift users away from intrinsic enjoyment of activities and towards extrinsic motivation, as users find it difficult to stop participating in behaviours that are constantly monitored and rewarded.
Quantified-self dependence can also have significant psychological consequences. Studies by Burford and Nuss and Li found that wearable users frequently reported feelings of guilt, stress and failure when they did not achieve their fitness goals. In fact, some participants described their wearable technologies as becoming so essential in their life that their entire day revolved around meeting exercise targets. In this sense, wearables are creating added stress rather than motivation. Beyond these emotional effects, wearable technology raises broader ethical concerns about how people understand health. Reliance on numerical health data rather than bodily intuition isn’t always the best approach, for example, people experiencing injuries or illness may feel pressure to complete fitness goals instead of listening to their bodies. Is hitting 10,000 steps really the answer if you are feeling sick? Your Apple Watch assumes that your body is “regularly and consistently in motion” and linearly increasing fitness. While health data can provide valuable insight, the transition from personal feelings to numerical measurements is not always straightforward. Wearables simply cannot capture every aspect of an individual’s health or replace the importance of listening to what the body needs.
Wearable technology has truly transformed the way people engage with health and fitness, making self-tracking a central part of modern wellness culture. While devices such as the Apple Watch, WHOOP, and Oura Ring can encourage healthier habits by providing personalized insights into activity, sleep, and recovery, their success also reflects a growing tendency to measure and optimize every aspect of daily life. As wearable technologies become increasingly integrated into personal identity, they offer opportunities for greater health awareness and increased engagement in physical activity. However, wearables also introduce risks of over-reliance on data, increased pressure to meet fitness goals, and reduced trust in bodily intuition. Ultimately, the challenge is not whether we should use wearable technology, but how we leverage it as a helpful tool without allowing data to replace our understanding of what our bodies need.