There's a never ending argument about wearables. Some doctors love them. Some doctors think they're worthless. Most people wearing one are over-relying on it, and a few people who could actually use the data aren't paying attention to any of it.
My take lands somewhere in the middle.
Some wearables aren't worth the box they showed up in. Some, like the Apple Watch, are genuinely useful even if you ignore every health metric on the thing. And then there's the stuff that's coming, which is where it gets interesting.
What the FDA just cleared
On August 25, the FDA authorized Abbott's Libre Duo 10 Day Continuous Dual Glucose Ketone Monitoring System. It's the first wearable authorized in the U.S. to continuously monitor ketones, and the first device anywhere to track glucose and ketones together. It's for people age 2 and up living with diabetes. It reads both every minute, sends it to your phone, and can alert you when ketones climb toward a dangerous threshold.
Here's why the ketone piece matters. Ketones show up when your body is burning fat instead of glucose for fuel. In someone with diabetes, ketones stacking up can turn into diabetic ketoacidosis, which is a life-threatening problem. Until now, checking ketones meant a separate test that gave you one number at one moment.
One number at one moment is a snapshot. It tells you where you are. It doesn't tell you where you're headed.
That's the whole shift. Instead of "what's my number," you get "which direction is my number moving, and how fast." For someone with diabetes, catching that curve early is not a nice-to-have. It's a big deal. The authorization came out of six studies and more than 600 patients, and the sensor caught elevated ketones before DKA set in.
Why I care as a coach, not a diabetic
Selfishly, here's what I'm looking at.
Right now if you want continuous glucose data, you're walking around the gym with a sensor stuck to the back of your arm like you're broadcasting something. Fine, it works, but nobody loves it. The direction this is heading is that eventually you won't need the patch at all. You'll pull it off your wrist.
That's actually pretty damn exciting to me. Not because glucose data is going to transform the average lifter's physique, but because it's proof that the hard stuff is becoming trackable. Ketones were a finger stick two years ago. Now they're a continuous readout.
What I'm still not sold on
HRV. Sleep scores. Readiness scores. Most of the metrics you're being told are life or death.
I'm not saying they're meaningless. I'm saying the gap between "this number moved" and "here's what I should do differently today" is enormous, and most people fill that gap with anxiety instead of action. I've watched clients have a great training session and then talk themselves into feeling tired because a watch gave them a 61 that morning. That's not health tracking. That's outsourcing how you feel to a piece of aluminum.
If a metric doesn't change a decision, it's decoration.
What I'm actually waiting for
This is where I think it gets legitimately good.
Hormones. Real insight into perimenopause instead of women being told they're fine while they feel like they're falling apart. Tracking spikes and crashes in testosterone, estrogen, progesterone, thyroid. Right now that's a blood draw, a wait, and a snapshot, and snapshots lie about hormones more than almost anything else in the body.
Inflammation is the other one. If wearables get to the point where they can flag a rising inflammatory load before it becomes a diagnosis, you're talking about predicting chronic disease instead of reacting to it. That's not a fitness feature. That's a different model of medicine.
I don't know how fast any of that arrives. I do know the ketone and glucose news is the kind of step that tells you the field is moving, and I'll be watching all of it.
The rule I'd give you today
Before you strap another thing to your body, ask one question:
What decision does this number help me make?
If you have a real answer, buy it and use it. If you don't, you just bought another number to worry about.
Also, the FDA said it plainly with this device, and it applies to every one of them: a reading is information, not a diagnosis. Ketones get interpreted next to glucose and next to how you actually feel. The dashboard isn't the doctor.
That's the part we built HollyFit around. Your physician reads the data and decides what it means. Your coach turns it into what you do Monday morning. Same team, same app. A number without someone accountable for what happens next is just a number.