This is how we use wearable tech to drive genuine health improvement in patients in my practice.
Every week, I have a new patient proudly display their wearable health data on a screen. The problem is they are often overwhelmed by the information and haven’t made a meaningful change despite the gadgetry.
My method is that we use the right tool for the right amount of time to give us the exact answer we’re looking for. Then the device goes offline until it’s needed again.
Welcome to the Physician-Led Health Coaching weekly newsletter. I’m Dr. Ashori, a board-certified physician & health coach. I help people fix brain fog, fatigue, and stubborn weight before they turn into real disease.
1. What Problem Are You Trying to Solve?
We use wearables quite a lot in my practice. But the first question is what problem we’re trying to solve. Most of the time the answer won’t come from a wearable.
In fact, stopping the use of a wearable has often decreased anxiety, relieved stress, and helped my patients become more in-tune with how they feel, instead of what shows up on their app.
A patient was wearing a CGM because he was worried about glucose spikes. He was noticing them when he’d eat watermelon. So he cut out the watermelon. The problem is that he was also replacing it with more candy and pastries. This made his A1C go up.
2. Increasing Your Daily Movement
By far the most supported evidence comes from using a wearable to help you get more steps in. The number of steps doesn’t matter. What matters is that you get more steps.
Many underestimate how many steps they get doing chores in the house. Just as many overestimate their activity levels.
A patient who was wearing his Oura Ring told me he’s getting close to 10K daily just doing house chores. We looked up the numbers and his 2 week average was 4,280.
3. Controlling the Dose of Exercise
How much exercise does your body need? At what intensity? How frequently and at what duration?
Most adults need more time in moderate-intensity exercise, often called Zone 2. But most are getting too much training in higher zones in short bursts, essentially not getting any good results.
Higher zones ≠ better training. In fact, you’ll need more time to recover, suffer more injuries, and won’t burn off the necessary fat through fat oxidation.
A patient’s Polar Chest Strap showed that she’s mostly in Zone 3-4 when exercising. We dropped her down to Zone 2 and she enjoyed better sleep, better recovery, and lost that stubborn weight she was battling.
4. Improve Your Duration
It’s not the sleep quality that improves with a wearable. The amount of Deep Sleep, Light or REM, or frequent awakenings are less valuable than your total sleep duration.
Almost any vetted wearable device can give you Polysomnography-level accuracy on the total time you were asleep.
You’ll start noticing a trend that with late meals, alcohol, arguments, or too much screen time you’ll spend fewer hours in bed. That’s one of the easiest sleep problems to remedy.
5. Heart Rate Data
The most important ones here are: resting heart rate, heart rate recovery, and exercise-level heart rates.
I didn’t mention HRV or the estimated VO2Max because they just aren’t that accurate and vary a lot based on genetics. Sure, if you see an upward or downward trend over time, it’s a valuable signal but the actual numbers don’t tell us much.
However, I want most of my patients to enjoy a low resting heart rate and I don’t want light-to-moderate exercise to spike up their HR too much. And for HR recovery, I want them to drop 20-30 beats in the first minute.
My patient’s Whoop Device showed that he only dropped 10-15 beats after an intense session. We dropped his hard workouts, switched him do more endurance training, had him to some breathing exercises and foam rolling of his ribs before a session and we got him up to ~30 BPM drop. Use this handy calculator for your next exercise session.
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Of course, it matters what question you’re answering. The goal with health techn isn’t to make you dependent on tech but to have you become more in-tune with your body.
Disclaimer:
Dr. Mohammad Ashori is a U.S.-trained family medicine physician. The content shared here is for education and general guidance. It is not personal medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment, and it does not create a doctor-patient relationship. Humans are complicated and your personal details matter. Your healthcare team is your best resource before making medical decisions, changing medications, or managing symptoms. This information is to help you add more depth to those conversations.
