Wearable Behavior Data Outperforms Raw Sensor Metrics in Health Predictions, Study Reveals

Health Predictions from Your Wrist: Why “Behavior” Beats Raw Sensor Data Smartwatches and fitness trackers now sit on more than a billion wrists, quietly logging heartbeats, footsteps, and sleep minutes. Most research still focuses on the millisecond-level waveforms these devices produce—PPG, ECG, accelerometer streams. A new large-scale study led by Apple and the American Heart Association flips the script. It shows that higher-level behavior metrics—things like daily step counts, resting heart-rate trends, and six-minute walk distance—can be turned into a foundation model that outperforms or complements traditional biosignal models on fifty-seven real-world health tasks. Below you will find a pragmatic, …