On a recent Monday afternoon, I opened the Oura app on my phone and asked a simple question: “I’m tired even though I got enough sleep last night. What should I do?”
It suggested that I take a walk, stretch or hydrate to perk up and boost my energy levels.
The chatbot from Oura, which makes smart rings that measure sleep, heart rate, skin temperature and other metrics, promptly responded with a reminder that quality matters just as much as quantity when it comes to sleep. The AI-powered coach inside the Oura app was able to draw on all the data that Oura’s algorithms have been crunching behind the scenes to give me advice based on my habits.
Interactions like this are a harbinger of where the smartwatch industry is headed in 2025 and beyond. Smartwatches are poised to get better at interpreting health metrics, connecting the dots between our biometric data points and turning those trends into actionable insights rather than just displaying a dashboard of statistics. Samsung and Google made steps in this direction in 2024 by launching new AI-powered tools in their own respective health apps for providing deeper insights about your health data.
At the same time that fitness continues to be the primary use case for wearables, as eMarketer notes in its 2023 report, AI is playing an increasingly larger role on phones and computers– which opens up new ways to manage tasks and handle and interpret data both on-device and in the cloud. And it’s the intersection of where health trackers and AI processing meet that could lead to more intelligent health companions on our wrists, fingers, eyes and ears.
“Continuous health monitoring, early detection, prevention, personalizing healthcare, that’s where it’s all headed,” said Ranjit Atwal, a research director on Gartner’s quantitative innovation team. “So you get information which is personalized to you and your context.”
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Smartwatches are becoming smarter health coaches
Smartwatches have been positioned as health companions for years, but they’re finally starting to live up to that promise. That’s thanks in part to bigger investments in AI, which companies are leveraging to form more valuable insights and make health data more understandable.
Rather than parsing through tables and graphs showing your sleeping patterns or exercise data, why not have Fitbit generate a custom chart based on your question? Or what if you could ask Siri how you slept last night instead of reaching for your phone?
Those are examples of the types of scenarios that exist today. Google’s Insight Explorer in the Fitbit app, for example, can answer questions about your Fitbit data. And the Apple Watch can process questions about some types of health data through Siri on the Series 9 models and later. Samsung also launched a new rating called Energy Score, which collates various sleep and activity metrics to provide takeaways about your current state, much like the readiness scores from Oura and Fitbit.
The Oura Ring 4 can measure a variety of health and wellness stats.
Jack Leathem, a research analyst at Canalys, points to smart rings like Oura and Zepp, the health app that works with Amazfit’s smartwatches, as two examples that are particularly ahead of the curve when it comes to health coaching and insights.
“They’re actually pushing quite a bit of innovation within the smartwatch fields,” Leathem said in reference to smart rings like Oura’s. “And vendors need to catch up.”
Apple and Samsung may have plans to develop their own full-fledged health chatbots in the future. Apple is reportedly working on a digital health coach that would provide health and lifestyle recommendations based on AI and Apple Watch data, according to Bloomberg. Samsung has tested a digital health coach that uses large language models to provide health insights based on their habits, such as whether a user sleeps better after exercising, CNET reported in June.
Features like these will become increasingly important as household names like Apple, Samsung and Google’s Fitbit face additional competition from smart rings like Oura’s and cheaper wrist-worn wearables, such as those made by Amazfit. Samsung, for instance, launched its first smart ring in 2024 as a health tracking alternative for those who want a more discrete, less distracting device.
But bringing additional AI-driven features to smartwatches is particularly challenging given how small such devices are. They lack the necessary computing power to process large amounts of data on-device. That’s why the smartwatch space has been relatively quiet when it comes to new AI tools compared to smartphones, laptops and tablets, all of which are brimming with new AI-fueled software tricks and tools. Apple Intelligence, for example, is available across the iPhone, iPad and Mac but not the Apple Watch.
The Pixel Watch 3
“Because of the nature of generative AI, you need the cloud or another processing unit to do the crunching,” said David McQueen, a research director at ABI Research. “And I don’t think smartwatches have that ability just yet.”
It’s a reality that Google, which operates the Wear OS software that powers many Android-compatible smartwatches in addition to selling its own Pixel Watches, acknowledges. When asked in May whether a version of Google’s Gemini model that could run on Wear OS smartwatches would be possible, Bjorn Kilburn, vice president of Wear OS and Android Health at Google, said doing so would likely “take some time.”
More dramatic changes are still further out
The most interesting changes in smartwatches appear to be happening on the software side. In terms of hardware, we can likely expect routine upgrades like new processors, fresh band styles and improved durability.
“Ultimately, it’s probably making things on there already a little bit better and more accurate,” said McQueen.
Tech giants like Apple and Samsung are getting additional use of the sensors that already exist on their smartwatches, as evidenced by the new sleep apnea detection features both companies launched this year. Apple’s, for example, leverages the Apple Watch’s accelerometer to detect subtle movements associated with obstructed breathing.
Newer models of the Apple Watch can detect possible signs of sleep apnea.
Certain models of Samsung’s Galaxy Watch outside the US support blood pressure readings when calibrated with a cuff-based monitor, yet another indication that smartwatches are indeed continuing to evolve into more sophisticated wellness monitors.
But existing hardware and sensors have their limits. The ambitious goal of using smartwatches to measure blood sugar changes, which Apple is said to have been working on for years, likely won’t arrive anytime soon. Bloomberg reports that such a device is still years away since Apple has struggled with getting the technology small enough to fit in a smartwatch — or even an iPhone. Apple is also reportedly working on blood pressure monitoring capabilities for the Apple Watch, according to Bloomberg, although it’s unclear when or if such technology will be released.
During a September interview with CNET, Deidre Caldbeck, senior director for Apple Watch and Health product marketing at Apple, said health and wellness stood out as being a major use case for the Apple Watch early on.
“Even after a short period of time, we started to hear from users who were noticing things about their health and fitness that they maybe would not have noticed before,” she said. “So we started to pull on those threads.”
In the nearer term, we’ll likely see a larger focus on nutrition and food logging in the health apps that accompany smartwatches and other wearables. Food logging apps aren’t new, but the focus on more holistic health among major smartwatches and smart rings means we could see a renewed interest in the space. Plus, if AI health chatbots are going to become truly useful, having a window into nutrition in addition to activity, sleeping patterns and bodily changes is going to be important.
Oura recently struck a partnership with glucose monitoring giant Dexcom to enable the companies’ products to work together to help provide more insights around metabolic health, while Bloomberg reports Apple has tested an app to help prediabetics monitor their nutrition. Samsung has previously said that nutrition is one of its four major areas of focus when it comes to health tracking, along with sleep, stress and activity.
Making watches more independent from your phone is still a challenge
Health and fitness tracking remain the biggest use cases for smartwatches.
For smartwatch makers, the holy grail has always been a device that is independent of your phone, freeing you from constantly looking at the black rectangular screen stored in your pocket. Cellular connectivity has been available on smartwatches like the Apple Watch for the better part of the last decade. But that connectivity is limited to slower 4G LTE speeds that narrow what a wearable can actually do.
The arrival of newer technologies, like 5G and generative AI, mean that making watches truly self-reliant will be more difficult. Smartwatches don’t currently support standalone 5G connectivity, although chipmakers like Qualcomm and MediaTek are looking to change that soon with new modem chips designed to help smaller gadgets connect to 5G networks.
Leathem, the Canalys researcher, speculates that devices running on these solutions, such as MediaTek’s RedCap (reduced capacity) tech, could arrive in 2025 or 2026. But even when the technology does arrive, it might still be hard to convince consumers cellular connectivity is worth it.
“They’re somewhat gimmicky,” Leathem said of cellular smartwatches. “In the sense that they’re kind of cool to have, but there’s not a clear and obvious use case that would justify the extra monthly payment.”
Generative AI is the other reason why smartwatches may rely on smartphones for the foreseeable future. Until AI models are small and efficient enough to run on a device as compact as a smartwatch, much of the computing will rely on tethered smartphones or the cloud. Atwal, the Gartner analyst, believes tech companies are likely already looking into how to shrink down language models — although they may not be doing so for smartwatches specifically but to enable AI to run on additional Internet of Things devices in general.
“They’re thinking, ‘OK, how do we reduce the size of this, how do we make this platform a smaller platform,” he said.
Smartwatches have evolved a lot over the last decade, going from basic step counters and notification machines to powerful health monitors capable of readings that previously required a doctor’s visit. They’ll continue moving in that direction, although it’ll take some time before entirely new types of health metrics arrive on our wrists.
In the meantime, don’t be surprised if you find yourself asking your watch or connected health app for advice about how to sleep better or build a customized exercise routine.
“It really comes down to this,” Ramon T. Llamas, a research director at the International Data Corporation covering mobile devices, said in a previous CNET interview. “Do you want to spend the rest of your time just collecting descriptive data: your history of steps, heart rate and sleep, or do you want to move on to the next stage?”
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