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Comment by snitzr | Hacker News Reader

While I'm sure a wearable could be occasionally useful or even save a life, most don't do much. It's telling that mainstream fitness wearables tout their data collection ability but never use this data in marketing to prove they make people healthier. I think most fitness wearables are cashing in on pseudo medical device branding as a way to charge hundreds of dollars for electronics that cost very little to manufacture. I'd be wary of those kinds of devices if I were a doctor.

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Both whoop band and Apple Watch + https://bevel.health plus a bunch of other fitness apps, give awesome abilities to folks, to improve their sleep, balance their energy cycle, reduce injuries by knowing when to rest more for recovery.

- Sleep

- Properly recovering each day for Consistent Cardio

- Stress minimisation with Tracking Triggers/Causes, Foods

These things alone are monumentally impactful in increasing longevity and health, more than any current available medicine, or therapy. Just these 3 factors alone.

And fitness bands combined with effective apps that make use of these metrics, do a pretty darn good job already to improve all these 3 critical factors that allow you to

- Live a healthier day

- Perform better at work

- Identify and mitigate causes that hurt your sleep (bad sleep -> bad day)

- Balance exercise with recovery

- Managing stress levels and making healthier choices

The sleep monitoring in particular is complicated: monitoring and especially alerting on sleep quality can exacerbate insomnia.

strictly speaking, I think apnea monitoring as done on the Apple Watch is pretty non-invasive and not too bad.

One thing that ended up being really noisy and irritating was a continuous glucose monitor. It turns out it's possible to stick those things in you in a way that can false alarm blood sugar drops during your sleep, at which point your CGM app freaks the hell out and wakes you up.

The Ringconn Gen 2, supposedly can detect sleep apnea. https://ringconn.com/products/ringconn-gen-2

The reviews I've read/watched about wearables ability to track sleep patterns seem to show great variability between what one wearable would say versus another.

Sleep apnea detection is mostly about detecting changes in blood oxygen and paused breathing, so if you can do that, you can diagnose sleep apnea.

The actual medical protocol is sleeping a night with a pulse oximeter on.

> most don't do much

Directly, maybe, not. But people love games and wearables gamify fitness. I think that's a net positive. My mother looks at her Apple Watch step count daily.

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