For years, I have been all in on wearable technology.
Not casually interested. Not simply wearing a watch to count miles. I have been deeply engaged, maybe even a little obsessed, with what smart sensors, health platforms, and performance apps might reveal about how I train, sleep, recover, work, travel, and live.
I have tried most of it: running watches, rings, sleep trackers, recovery platforms, heart rate monitors, cycling computers, smart goggles, activity sensors, and apps designed to make sense of nearly every signal coming from the body. If it measured readiness, stress, sleep, heart rate, training load, pace, movement, or recovery, I was interested.
Some of it has been useful. Much of it is technically impressive. A few products have genuinely changed how I train and how I think about performance.
But over time, I have begun asking a more fundamental question:
Why does this technology deserve a place on my body and in my mind?
That is the question the wearable technology industry needs to answer more honestly.
The Battle for Real Estate
Wearable technology is now deeply embedded in health, wellness, performance, and sport. Watches and trackers sit on wrists all day. Rings capture sleep data through the night. Apps assign scores to recovery, stress, readiness, cardiovascular health, and activity. Sensors are being built into shoes, glasses, footbeds, clothing, bikes, goggles, and almost anything that can sit close to the human body.
The premise is powerful. Better data should lead to better decisions. Better decisions should lead to better health, more sustainable training, improved performance, and perhaps a longer, more capable life.
In theory, that makes sense.
But the market is crowded with companies that remain more focused on the technology than the person using it. They celebrate the precision of the sensor, the sophistication of the algorithm, the volume of data collected, and the elegance of the dashboard. They often spend less time considering the emotional reality of the consumer experience.
The human body is not simply another data source, and a person’s attention is not free real estate.
To wear a device is to invite it into intimate parts of daily life: sleep, fatigue, movement, anxiety, aging, ambition, recovery, and self-image. A company is not simply asking a consumer to purchase hardware. It is asking for access to routine, attention, trust, and judgment.
That is a much bigger request than the industry often acknowledges.
I have not rejected technology. I have become more intentional about when I use it, where it belongs, and what I expect it to do.
Today, I wear technology primarily when I am training and when it has a clear, practical job. The best tools help me understand the work, improve the experience, or make the activity safer. They support the session without becoming the focus of it.
When I run, I use a Garmin watch and Avelo shoes.
The Garmin gives me the information I need: pace, distance, route, effort, and heart rate when it is useful. It helps frame the run without turning every mile into a negotiation with a screen. The Avelo shoes represent a newer, potentially more interesting category of performance technology. They are still earning their place in my personal fitness technology stack, but the opportunity is clear. Sensors are moving closer to the actual mechanics of running, enabling us to understand how we move, not simply how far or how fast we go.
When I swim, I wear FORM goggles.
This is technology that fits naturally into the activity. In the pool, real-time information can be genuinely useful. Pace, intervals, distance, and performance feedback can influence what happens during the workout, not just summarize it afterward. The data is immediate, relevant, and connected directly to the work being done.
When I ride, I use a bike computer, power meter, heart rate monitor, and flashing radar light.
Each tool has a defined purpose. The bike computer provides navigation and the broader context of the ride. The power meter helps quantify effort and manage intensity, particularly on longer rides or structured training days. The heart rate monitor provides another useful layer of context around effort, fatigue, and how the body is responding. And the radar light may be the most valuable technology of all. It improves situational awareness, alerting me to approaching vehicles and making the road environment a little more manageable.
Not every piece of athletic technology needs to promise optimization. Sometimes its greatest contribution is safety.
That has become my standard:
Does this technology have a legitimate job to do?
Technology Should Serve the Moment
The difference between useful technology and intrusive technology is often simple.
Useful technology is present when it improves a specific moment. Intrusive technology continues collecting, scoring, interpreting, and commenting long after its value has diminished.
A runner may benefit from pace and heart rate data during a training session. A swimmer may benefit from live feedback in a structured workout. A cyclist may benefit from navigation and a radar alert on an open road.
But that does not mean the same person needs a device interpreting every hour of every day.
The modern wellness ecosystem has built much of its business around continuous tracking. More data is assumed to be better. More measurements are assumed to produce better insights. More insights are assumed to create better behavior.
That chain is not always true.
More data can create clarity, but it can also create noise. It can lead people to question how they feel until an app confirms it. It can turn sleep into a test, recovery into a score, and training into a negotiation with an algorithm.
A person wakes up feeling rested, but the readiness score is low. Suddenly, they are unsure whether to trust their own feelings and experience.
A person feels tired after a difficult week of work, travel, family commitments, and training, but the app suggests they are ready to go. They may ignore a signal that deserves more attention.
The issue is not that the technology is wrong. The issue is that the technology is incomplete.
A device can measure selected signals. It cannot fully understand the context of a life.
The Body Is Still the Best Sensor
We have become remarkably good at handing over judgment to devices.
Before a run, many people check the score. Before a hard workout, they check recovery. After a night of sleep, they check whether the algorithm agrees that it was restorative. We have been trained to look first at a dashboard and only then at ourselves.
I am trying to reverse that order.
Right now, I am enjoying the silence that comes from not being tracked all day. I am listening more closely to what my body is telling me before looking to an app to give me an answer.
That does not mean abandoning data. It means returning data to its proper role.
The body communicates constantly. It tells us when effort feels easy or disproportionately hard. It tells us when soreness is ordinary training fatigue and when it may be developing into something more persistent. It tells us when sleep has been thin for several nights, when travel has taken a toll, when stress is beginning to accumulate, and when a workout should be adjusted.
Those signals are not perfect. They are influenced by mood, motivation, emotion, weather, workload, and habit. But they are real. Often, they are richer than a single number on a phone screen.
The best wearable technology should strengthen that awareness, not replace it.
A Periodic Return to Data
I may return to more continuous tracking at some point.
Maybe it will be quarterly. Maybe twice a year. I have not decided yet.
There is a strong case for using wearable technology as a periodic check-in rather than a permanent presence. A few weeks or a month of more comprehensive tracking could reveal patterns that are hard to see in the normal pace of life: changes in sleep consistency, resting heart rate, recovery, training load, stress, or the accumulated effect of travel and work.
Used this way, technology becomes a diagnostic tool.
It can help confirm an instinct, identify a pattern, or raise a question worth exploring. It can offer a more objective view of a season of training or a demanding stretch of life without requiring every day to be graded.
That may be a healthier relationship with the category for many people.
Technology should not become a permanent referee in the relationship between an individual and their body. It should be a resource available when needed.
A readiness score can be a prompt. It should not be a verdict.
The Design Challenge Ahead
The greatest opportunity in wearable technology is not simply to build better hardware.
It is building products that understand the difference between measurement and meaning.
The companies that win will not necessarily be those that collect the most data, send the most notifications, or persuade users to wear a device every hour of every day. They will be the companies that create trust by being genuinely useful.
They will know when to provide information and when to remain quiet.
They will respect the reality that people do not live inside a controlled laboratory. They live complicated lives. They train around work, school, travel, children, stress, injuries, relationships, and changing priorities. They do not need another system telling them they have failed because sleep was imperfect or because a hard day did not produce the right score.
They need tools that help them make better decisions in the real world.
That requires a more human centered approach to product design.
A runner should want to use the technology on the trail because it clarifies the run.
A swimmer should want it in the pool because it improves the workout.
A cyclist should trust it on the road because it adds awareness and safety.
When the session ends, the user should be able to take the technology off without feeling as though they are missing something essential.
What Earns Its Place
The future of this space will not be determined only by sensor accuracy, artificial intelligence, hardware design, or the next wave of health data integration.
The biggest question we need to ask is whether a product earns its place.
Does it help someone train better without making training more complicated?
Does it improve safety without creating fear?
Does it provide useful context without creating dependency?
Does it make a person more aware of their body, or more dependent on a screen?
For me, the answer is becoming clearer.
I want technology when I am running, swimming, or riding because it can improve those activities. I want it when it has a defined purpose. I want it when it offers a useful signal, greater awareness, or practical protection.
But I do not need it to narrate the rest of my life.
For now, I am choosing more silence. More instinct. More attention to what the body is already saying.
Perhaps that is the real promise of great wearable technology: not that it teaches us to trust the machine more than ourselves, but that it helps us become better listeners when the machine is turned off.