Wearable health devices: Helpful or harmful

Taylor Barnes

713-798-4710

Houston, TX - Aug 25, 2026

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Wearable healthcare devices help people gauge different aspects of health, including heart rate, sleep and fitness. Fitness bands, rings and watches help reach health goals, but people should be cautious when relying on them for overall health.

"Most patients wear this to gauge data, whether training for a marathon/ironman, achieving fitness or sleep goals, or they want their average resting heart rate to be a certain number. These are very useful for achieving those goals," said Dr. Mike Ren, primary care physician and assistant professor at Baylor College of Medicine.

While these devices are not medical grade, the everyday average user benefits from them to measure heart rate variability and sleep. There is variance in fluctuation on the step counter since raising or shaking the arm might count as a step. Their measurement of oxygen also is less accurate than their other functions.

Wearing a health tracker helps support fitness, weight loss and sleep goals, but people should still listen to their doctor's recommendations over relying on the data from wearable technology.

"These devices are not medical grade, so if you do an EKG and it tells you that you have arrythmia or something wrong with your heart, but your device doesn't, listen to the EKG," Ren said.

Wearable technology devices provide innovative methods of tracking health.

According to Ren, good, consistent data is beneficial when it comes to health: "If you normally sleep seven hours every night and you tell your doctor you've had more fatigue lately and your device says your sleep score has gone down, we can corroborate that. We can go back throughout the past few days to get to the bottom of what is causing poor sleep, and if we have the data to corroborate that story as well as relying on the patient's memory, it's helpful."

Those who fixate on things like a low sleep score one night or a low step count one day should use the data to improve it instead of letting the data preoccupy them. Health trackers offer benefits including:

• Adverse detection: Some devices offer fall or crash detection that will alert emergency services, as well as dialing 911 if experiencing arrythmia or the heart stops beating.
• Long-term trend monitoring: Devices track physiological signals to establish baseline metrics, so they might catch something earlier than one would have, allowing them to act on it sooner, such as a shift in sleep or resting heart rate.

Deciding which type of device to wear should be based on personal preference and comfort. Health watches, rings or bands provide similar accuracy for sleep, heart rate and blood oxygen levels, and these devices might track step count better than a cell phone.

"Some people really care about the data, and that's fine, but if you're not acting on it when it tells you your heart rate has gone up while you're gaining weight and being less healthy, then what good is the data?" Ren said.