The Health Wearables Revolution: How the Highest Fidelity Category Can Empower Behavior Change

We are in the midst of a wearables movement. More than a third of U.S. adults own consumer health and wellness devices — smartwatches, fitness bands and smart rings — that track personal fitness, daily activity and wellness metrics. Leading brands like Apple Watch, WHOOP and ŌURA have shipped hundreds of millions of devices, building large, highly engaged user bases. The global wearables market, valued at over $100 billion in 2025, is projected to grow more than fourfold in the next decade.

Amidst this growing consumer wearables market, health is worsening. Chronic conditions, including heart disease, cancer, diabetes and hypertension, are widespread. More than half of American adults have at least one chronic condition, and over one-quarter live with two or more. The increase in these conditions is complex and structural, shaped by environments that promote sedentary living, the ubiquity of highly processed foods and unequal access to healthy options. And everyday behaviors like diet, physical activity, sleep and stress are modifiable risk factors for many of these chronic conditions.

The growing popularity of wearables means these devices are increasingly integrated into clinical care. But their presence alone will not reverse worsening health outcomes. The true promise of wearables depends on how well they help people translate information into action, and action into sustained behavior. For clinicians, patients, payers and healthcare organizations, the opportunity is to design experiences that help people use that data to build healthier behaviors over time.

The Key to Consumer Wearables’ Influence: High Fidelity

Wearables have achieved something that healthcare is struggling to do: earn a consistent, trusted place in people’s daily lives. These devices are always on, always present and deeply embedded in everyday routines.

Personally, I wear my smartwatch nearly all the time, only taking it off to charge it. When I occasionally forget to put it back on and go for a walk without it, it’s unsettling. Nothing about the walk itself has changed. But the absence of the data makes the experience feel somehow incomplete. The device has become part of my experience and validates my behavior.

Material’s framework for explaining the strength of the relationship that brands like WHOOP, Apple Watch and ŌURA have built with consumers is called Brand Fidelity™. Brands build Fidelity, a durable connection with consumers, when they deliver consistent presence, personal relevance, ease and meaningful value over time. They are personal, intuitive, accessible and dependable. Our research, which studied 24,000 consumers and hundreds of global brands across more than 30 categories, demonstrates that these brands are not only leaders in consumer technology — they also rank among the highest Fidelity brands across all categories measured in our framework.

One reason wearables rank highly in our Fidelity framework is that they reflect a broader cultural shift toward personalization and ownership. People now have access to information about their bodies that was once largely confined to clinical settings. They can decide which metrics matter to them and how to engage with the data.

Wearables are also popular because they are not entirely new. Watches, bracelets and rings are familiar objects, worn on the body for generations. By designing health-tracking devices as superpowered versions of these everyday items, wearable brands worked within existing habits rather than asking people to start from scratch. That matters for behavior change: it is often easier to build on routines people already have than to introduce something wholly new. Over time, the device becomes less like technology people have to remember to use and more like an invisible extension of daily life. Wearables succeed, in part, because they make health tracking feel like a natural extension of something people already know how to do.

The ability to influence behavior must be earned, and wearables show one way to earn it: by delivering experiences that feel personal, useful and easy to integrate into daily life. For healthcare organizations, there is an opportunity to build on the trusted place these devices already occupy in people’s lives to influence health behaviors.

From Engagement to Behavior Change

For all their success, wearables reveal the limits of engagement alone. People may wear the device, check the data and engage with the interface, but that does not guarantee they will sleep more, move more or eat differently. With meaningful abandonment rates for both wearables and health-focused apps — 30% for all new users, and a shocking 98% among people managing chronic conditions — it is clear that adoption is only the starting point. To understand how wearables can move from engagement to impact, we look beyond the device experience to the science of behavior change.

Behavior change is hard. Existing behaviors are embedded in people’s identities, routines, environments and relationships. Even when they genuinely want to change, people are biased toward the status quo. Habits pull them back to what is familiar. Motivation fluctuates. Social pressures intervene. This creates a fundamental tension: health data has never been more accessible, but the realities of modern life often make healthier choices harder to sustain.

A Science-Based Approach to Behavior Change

Successful behavior change must account for the complexity of people’s lives.

A large body of behavioral science research shows that behavior change depends on three core factors: capability, opportunity and motivation. Health professionals must keep all three in mind as they consider influencing health behaviors that incorporate wearables.

The first dimension is capability, which refers to whether people have the knowledge, skills and physical ability to perform a behavior. For example, this might mean understanding what counts as moderate cardiovascular activity; a person may want to reach 150 minutes of cardiovascular exercise per week but may not know that brisk walking counts.

Opportunity refers to whether a person’s environment makes the behavior possible. This includes physical factors such as time, money and access. A person may understand the importance of eating more fruits and vegetables but live in a neighborhood with limited access to fresh food, or in a household where someone else is primarily responsible for food and does not share these goals.

Motivation refers to the internal and external forces that facilitate starting and continuing a behavior. Motivation can include personal goals, identity or incentives, and may fade when progress is slow or when competing priorities take over.

How Healthcare Organizations Can Build on Consumer Wearables to Drive Behavior Change

Healthcare organizations have an opportunity to use wearables as part of a broader behavior change system, one that connects personal health data to timely, relevant support in the moments when people are making everyday decisions. Wearable data can help reveal patterns, identify moments of risk or opportunity and make progress more visible. But the impact depends on how that data is translated into experiences that enable healthier behaviors in the context of people’s daily lives.

Designing those experiences requires a deep understanding of the population and behavior at hand. Organizations need to know what people value, what gets in their way, where they need support and what kinds of experiences they are willing to trust and rely on over time. That research can reveal whether the biggest barriers are related to knowledge and confidence, access and context, motivation and meaning or some combination of all three.

With that understanding, healthcare organizations can then design wraparound programs that are easier to engage with and better aligned to how people live. In such programs, wearables would turn data into timely, realistic support that makes healthier behaviors easier to start, sustain and return to after setbacks.

Here are three actionable ways healthcare organizations can unlock the High Fidelity characteristics of wearables to lead to real behavior change.

1.  Integrate consumer wearables into care delivery

Because wearables are already part of many people’s daily lives, healthcare organizations have an opportunity to build trust and drive health outcomes through tools patients are familiar with. To realize that potential, they need High Fidelity support systems that help patients understand their data, why it matters and what to do next. Insights from wearables can be paired with clear guidance, personalized feedback and timely clinical touchpoints that make the data feel relevant to the patient’s everyday decisions. Designed well, these systems can help move wearables from consumer devices to meaningful extensions of the care experience.

2.  Match the wearable experience to the patient’s journey and readiness

As providers integrate wearables into care delivery, they should be intentional about where these devices create the most value across the care journey. For some patients, a wearable may be most useful after an initial visit to build a more complete picture of daily patterns; for others, it may serve as an always-on monitor for faster detection and response. The level of support, data visibility and clinical integration should be tailored to the patient’s needs. By applying behavioral science principles, providers can identify what patients need at key moments to build capability, create opportunity or strengthen motivations, helping wearable data translate into meaningful behavior change.

3.  Use wearables to identify risk earlier and intervene sooner

One high-value opportunity is using wearables early in the patient journey. Healthcare providers can use wearables as proactive tools for detecting changes in patient behavior, physiology and routines before issues escalate into expensive, reactive care. Providers can design care pathways that translate data into timely outreach, coaching, escalation or treatment adjustments. Used early in the patient journey, wearables can help clinicians better understand patients’ everyday realities and act before small risks become serious health events.

Wearables are not the future of health on their own; what matters is what healthcare organizations build around them. The opportunity is to turn everyday signals into earlier insight, stronger patient relationships and more proactive care. When done well, wearable-enabled programs can help shift healthcare from episodic intervention to continuous, personalized support.

Insights to Unlock Behavior Change

With our grounding in behavioral science, our M+ Brand Fidelity framework and our focus on intelligent growth, Material helps healthcare organizations tap into the High Fidelity characteristics of wearable brands to drive better health and wellness outcomes.

Want to learn how to move your patients from wearable adoption to adherence? Start the conversation today.