Wearables
Wearables are computing devices worn on the body that continuously collect data, provide information, or augment the wearer's capabilities — encompassing smartwatches, fitness trackers, smart rings, smartglasses, hearables, and health monitoring devices.
The wearable market has matured from novelty step counters into a critical layer of personal health infrastructure. Apple Watch's FDA-cleared ECG and blood oxygen monitoring, combined with fall detection and crash detection, have made it a legitimate medical device on millions of wrists. Samsung, Garmin, and Google's Pixel Watch compete with increasingly sophisticated biometric sensing. The Oura Ring popularized the smart ring form factor, tracking sleep architecture, heart rate variability, and readiness scores in a device indistinguishable from jewelry.
Health and Biomonitoring
The most transformative wearable category is continuous health monitoring. Continuous glucose monitors (CGMs) from Dexcom and Abbott — once restricted to diabetics — are crossing into the wellness market, giving healthy users real-time metabolic feedback. Wearable blood pressure monitors, continuous temperature sensors, and sweat-based biomarker analysis are in various stages of commercialization. The trajectory points toward a future where wearable sensors provide a continuous, comprehensive picture of physiological state — what some researchers call a "digital twin" of the body's health. This connects directly to biointerface technology as sensors become smaller, more accurate, and more intimately integrated with the body.
Contextual and Ambient Computing
Beyond health, wearables are becoming the primary interface for ambient computing. Ray-Ban Meta glasses sold over 7 million units in 2025 by combining AI assistance, camera capture, and audio in a socially acceptable form factor. AirPods and competing hearables provide spatial audio, real-time translation, and voice-activated AI agent access. Smart rings like the Oura and Samsung Galaxy Ring deliver notifications and health data without requiring users to look at a screen. The common thread is computing that recedes into accessories people already wear, rather than demanding attention through a phone or screen.
The Augmentation Spectrum
Wearables sit on a spectrum of human augmentation that ranges from passive data collection (fitness trackers) through active feedback (haptic alerts, real-time coaching) to direct biological interface (brain-computer interfaces and implantable sensors). As wearable sensors grow more capable and AI systems grow better at interpreting their data, the line between "wearing a computer" and "augmenting the body" continues to blur. Exoskeletons for industrial workers, EEG headbands for neurofeedback, and EMG armbands for gesture control all extend wearables beyond passive monitoring into active human capability enhancement.
For the agentic web, wearables provide the sensory layer that grounds AI agents in the physical context of their user — location, activity, physiological state, and environmental conditions. An agent that knows you're stressed (elevated heart rate), in a meeting (calendar + location), and haven't eaten (glucose trend) can make far better decisions about when and how to assist than one limited to screen-based interaction.