What Gut Health Wearables Can and Can't Measure

A new wearable comes along every few months, promising to analyze something from your body that once required a lab. It started with sleep, then moved on to stress, and now it’s your gut. To be honest, the first time I saw a company claim that its device could measure my gut health with a patch on my belly, I thought it was nonsense. The problem isn’t that these wearables can’t detect anything useful. It’s that detecting digestive activity and measuring your microbiome are two very different things, and marketing often treats them as interchangeable.

Let’s look at how these wearables work, since “gut health wearable” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in marketing copy right now.

What These Wearables Actually Measure

Here is the information that is never going to be in the headline. The device is unable to sequence your microbiome. No current wearable can tell you...

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