Modern wearables can track everything from heart rate variability to sleep staging — but only a fraction have been clinically validated.
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When it comes to health optimization, many people already know the basics: eat well, exercise, sleep enough and manage stress. But what health tracking data should be measured over time to see if your choices are actually making you healthier? Tools for tracking health and wellness, as of 2026, have never been more accessible and sophisticated.
Tracking data in and of itself can often a first step to improved health. For many, it helps transform abstract wellness goals into measurable action. It provides a continuous feedback loop that can reveal how the body responds to stress, diet, and exercise, and catch subtle negative trends before they develop into major medical issues.
I’m a physician who spends a lot of time at the intersection of cutting-edge innovation in health and wellness. Here’s my take on many ways out there to track your health and aging, and what the evidence actually says.
1. Blood Biomarker Panels
Regular bloodwork is a backbone of preventive medicine. Routine blood work as a preventive measure typically begins around age 20, when most adults should have periodic baseline screenings (like a CBC and cholesterol check) during an annual physical.
Beyond that longevity-focused blood tests include expanded panels testing for apolipoprotein B (ApoB), high-sensitivity C-reactive protein (hsCRP), fasting insulin and hormonal panels, all of which have robust longitudinal data linking them to mortality.
The evidence for ApoB is particularly strong: the 2026 ACC/AHA Dyslipidemia Guidelines formally recommend ApoB measurement, noting it predicts ASCVD risk more accurately than LDL-C, especially in patients with diabetes or triglycerides ≥150 mg/dL. For hsCRP, a study found that a single measurement provided a greater spread of cardiovascular risk over 30 years than LDL cholesterol or lipoprotein(a).
Getting blood tests through your physician typically involves a copay and can vary based on insurance plans. By contrast, companies like Function Health (cost is $365) and InsideTracker ($489 for a blood test & annual membership) now offer panels of 50–250+ markers, making comprehensive testing accessible without a doctor’s order.
While these large multi-lab panels can sometimes identify health issues earlier and can provide useful insights, the challenge is interpretation: more data is not always better, and overtesting can sometimes lead to unnecessary anxiety and interventions.
2. Wearable Devices: The Always-On Health Monitor
Trackers like Oura Ring ($349-499 with a $6/month membership), Apple Watch ($249 for the SE to $799+ for the Apple Watch Ultra3) and WHOOP ($199 to $359 per year) continuously measure heart rate variability, resting heart rate, sleep staging, activity levels, and increasingly, blood oxygen and skin temperature.
Consumer wearables are excellent at tracking heart rate or detecting conditions like atrial fibrillation. However, they also overestimate total sleep time and show high variability in physical activity intensity measurements. Notably, only about 11% of commercially available devices have been validated for even one biometric outcome.
Despite these limitations, for tracking trends over time in your own body, wearables are genuinely useful.
3. VO₂ Max
VO₂ max — maximal oxygen uptake during exercise — may be the single most powerful longevity predictor available. The American Heart Association has designated cardiorespiratory fitness a “clinical vital sign,” noting each 1-MET increase is associated with a 10–25% improvement in survival.
The good news: VO₂ max is highly trainable at any age. The bad news: precise measurement requires a formal cardiopulmonary exercise test (CPET). Some sports clinics offer the test for $400 to $600 out of pocket. Consumer wearables estimate VO₂ max from heart rate data. This is imperfect but reasonably correlated with measured values and useful for tracking trends over time.
4. Continuous Glucose Monitoring
Continuous glucose monitors (CGMs) — small sensors worn on the arm that measure blood sugar every few minutes — were designed for diabetes. But more recently, they have been enthusiastically adopted by the longevity community. Brands such as Dexcom’s Stelo ($99 for 30 days) and Abbott’s Lingo ($89 for 4 weeks) have made this mainstream. The premise is compelling: see in real time how your blood glucose responds to food, exercise, stress, and sleep.
Evidence in non-diabetic adults, however, is still emerging. A 2026 systematic review of 23 studies (1,074 non-diabetic participants) found CGM use significantly improved mean blood glucose compared with controls, yet the benefit was concentrated in individuals with prediabetes. No appreciable glycemic improvement was observed in healthy normoglycemic populations, and there was no significant effect on body mass index (BMI).
Ultimately, a CGM can be seen as a “precision biofeedback tool integrated within structured lifestyle programs” rather than a standalone intervention. For people with prediabetes or strong family histories of type 2 diabetes, CGMs offer genuinely valuable personalized data. For healthy individuals, the clinical utility remains unproven.
5. DEXA Scans
The DEXA scan tells you precisely how much of your body is muscle, fat, and bone — and where fat is distributed. This matters because sarcopenia (loss of muscle mass) and osteoporosis are silent killers of healthspan. Both contribute to falls, fractures and disability. Visceral fat (the fat around your organs) is a stronger cardiovascular and metabolic risk factor than body weight alone.
The evidence for DEXA is robust. The Health, Aging, and Body Composition Study demonstrated that both lower baseline levels and greater declines in DXA-measured lean mass along with grip strength and gait speed were associated with increased mortality over 10–14 years. At $75–150, repeated annually after age 40, it is one of the highest-value tests available.
6. Epigenetic Age Clocks
Epigenetic clocks analyze DNA methylation patterns to estimate biological age — how old your biology looks relative to your chronological age. Third-generation clocks like GrimAge and DunedinPACE have demonstrated strong mortality associations across large cohorts.
A study of Finnish twins followed for up to 20 years confirmed GrimAge predicted mortality independently of physical activity, BMI, smoking, and chronic diseases. DunedinPACE is particularly intriguing: rather than estimating accumulated biological age, it measures your current pace of aging — one DunedinPACE unit equals one biological year per calendar year — and adds incremental prediction beyond GrimAge.
Saliva-based tests ($229 to $299) from companies like TruDiagnostic and Elysium now put this technology in consumer hands. The caveats: substantial heterogeneity exists across clocks, with no single model uniformly superior. Best interpreted as directional tools repeated every 6–12 months, not definitive diagnostics.
7. Physical Performance Testing
Grip strength, gait speed, and sit-to-stand repetitions may not sound futuristic, but the evidence linking them to longevity is extraordinary — and the cost is essentially zero.
A meta-analysis of 38 studies involving nearly 2 million participants confirmed higher grip strength was associated with a 31% lower risk of all-cause mortality with a slightly stronger association in women.
Gait speed under 0.8 m/s in older adults is a strong independent predictor of adverse outcomes. The five-times sit-to-stand test assesses functional lower extremity strength and is associated with fall risk and mortality. Anyone can track these monthly at home with a $30 hand dynamometer and a stopwatch.
8. Sleep Tracking
Sleep is one of the most powerful and most neglected determinants of longevity. A UK Biobank study of over 407,000 individuals found sleep ≤5 hours was associated with 25% higher all-cause mortality compared with 7 hours.
Tracking goes beyond total hours: deep sleep proportion, REM sleep, sleep efficiency, and timing consistency all matter. Modern wearables provide reasonably accurate sleep staging, though they tend to overestimate total sleep time. One caveat: tracking sleep can itself become anxiety-provoking — a phenomenon called orthosomnia — which can paradoxically worsen sleep quality.
9. Proteomic and Multi-Omics Aging And Disease Clocks
High-throughput proteomic platforms like SomaLogic’s SomaScan can now measure over 10,000 proteins simultaneously, generating “aging clocks” that predict biological age and disease risk. A proteomic clock developed in the UK Biobank using nearly 3,000 plasma proteins achieved high accuracy in predicting chronological age and was associated with 18 major chronic diseases and all-cause mortality across diverse populations. Yet, head-to-head comparisons suggest proteomic clocks perform similarly to epigenetic clocks, with each capturing different dimensions of aging.
The most promising direction may be multi-omics integration, combining proteomics, metabolomics, and epigenetics, which has achieved prediction accuracy exceeding 0.90 for conditions like type 2 diabetes and Alzheimer’s disease. Several companies are working to bring these platforms toward consumer accessibility, though costs remain high ($500–2,000+) and the commercial landscape is largely outside the scope of peer-reviewed validation.
Despite the scientific promise, most molecular biomarkers of biological age remain in early translational stages. For most people, the evidence does not yet support routine use.
10. Full-Body MRI Screening
Whole-body MRI ($1,000–3,000) from companies like Prenuvo and Ezra promises early detection of cancer and organ disease. A 2026 systematic review of over 9,000 asymptomatic individuals found a pooled cancer detection rate of just 1.57%, with approximately 32% of scans revealing incidental findings requiring follow-up — most of which are benign.
Major medical organizations have not endorsed routine use in asymptomatic individuals, though for those with strong family histories or known genetic mutations (e.g., BRCA, Li-Fraumeni), the risk-benefit calculation shifts favorably. For the average healthy adult under 50, the juice is probably not yet worth the squeeze.
With so many options, it helps to sort by evidence quality and cost rather than novelty. Physical performance testing (grip strength, gait speed) and DEXA scans offer the strongest evidence relative to cost, and belong in most people’s routine. ApoB and hsCRP panels are worth adding to standard bloodwork.
Wearables and CGMs as health trackers are genuinely useful for tracking personal trends. By contrast, epigenetic clocks, proteomics and full-body MRI remain promising but are still ahead of the evidence for most healthy adults — reasonable if cost isn’t a barrier, but not yet essential. As with most things in preventive medicine, consistently tracking a few well-validated metrics over years beats chasing every new test that comes to market.