In the near future, the watch on your wrist will handle things your doctor's office currently does. Regardless of what you think of his politics, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told Congress last year that he wants every American wearing a wearable within four years, and based on the breakthroughs we're seeing on a near weekly basis from the wearables industry, his vision doesn't seem so far fetched.


A Body Scan On Your Wrist

Samsung is running a six-month study with Massachusetts General Hospital to test whether Galaxy Watch 8 can track muscle loss in people taking GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy. These drugs work well for weight loss, but over 30% of the weight people lose on them can come from muscle, not fat. Losing muscle raises your risk of heart disease and makes it harder to keep the weight off later.

The study is checking whether the watch's body composition sensor, which estimates how much of you is muscle versus fat by sending a small electrical signal through your body, is accurate enough to match a DXA scan.

A DXA scan is an expensive appointment where you travel to a clinic and lie inside a large specialized scanning chamber while a machine measures your body composition. The watch is trying to do the same thing, just while you're sitting on your couch. One hundred people are in the study, split into two groups, and it runs for six months.

Faint Detection

A Samsung study with Chung-Ang University Gwangmyeong Hospital in Korea found that Galaxy Watch 6 can predict the most common type of fainting up to five minutes before it happens, with 84.6% accuracy. That type of fainting, called vasovagal syncope, happens when your blood pressure and heart rate suddenly drop, usually from stress or shock, and you briefly lose consciousness.

The faint itself is rarely dangerous, but the fall that comes with it can cause serious injuries like broken bones or a head injury.

The study was published in the European Heart Journal and is the first to show a regular consumer smartwatch can predict fainting before it happens. Samsung hasn't added this as a feature yet, but the sensors already in the watch produced the result.

Non-Invasive Glucose Monitoring

Apple recently put Zongjian Chen, the engineer who built Apple's in-house modem chip, in charge of its long-running project to add blood sugar monitoring to Apple Watch. Blood sugar monitoring currently requires either pricking your finger daily or wearing a separate medical device that sticks to your arm. Apple's version would do it with the watch alone.

The system shines a specific wavelength of laser light through the skin, measures how the light bounces back after interacting with glucose in the fluid just below the surface, and uses software to calculate your blood sugar level from that reading. It would also warn you if your levels look like early-stage prediabetes, before you've been diagnosed with anything.

According to the CDC, over 100 million Americans have prediabetes and 8 in 10 of them have no idea, because finding out requires a blood test and a reason to go get one. A watch that checks your blood sugar around the clock, without you doing anything, catches that problem years before a doctor would.

Where We're At

The future features build on a foundation that's already more capable than most people know. A study published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology found Apple Watch detected atrial fibrillation four times more often than standard doctor monitoring, catching it in 9.6% of participants compared to 2.3% in the group receiving normal care, and 57% of those cases were in people who felt completely fine.

Atrial fibrillation, or AFib, is an irregular heartbeat that causes blood clots to form in the heart, and those clots are responsible for about one in four strokes. Most people who have it never feel a thing.

Apple Watch Series 11 already detects sleep apnea, flags signs of high blood pressure, reads your heart rhythm with an ECG, and monitors blood oxygen, all cleared by the FDA. Sleep apnea is when your breathing stops and starts repeatedly while you sleep, and most people with it have never been diagnosed.

Samsung Galaxy Watch 8 carries the same FDA-cleared sleep apnea detection and ECG, and in March 2026 Samsung added blood pressure monitoring to Galaxy Watch in the US for the first time, using the watch's sensors alongside a standard arm cuff for calibration every 28 days.

The American Academy of Neurology published guidance in April 2026 telling doctors how to use data from wearables like Apple Watch to catch serious conditions early.

Kennedy's four-year timeline is ambitious but looking more realistic each week.