I write this as I’m wearing an Apple Watch and have years of my health data stored in Apple Health. However, sometimes a news item lands not as a surprise but as a low-pressure system that makes you draw connections. You don’t react so much as feel the conditions shift.
This piece in Politico this morning about Oura Rings wearable health devices becoming normalized across military programs (I didn’t realize the DOD is Oura’s largest customer), political circles, and public health messaging produced something like that for me. Not an alarm exactly. Not dismissal either. Something closer to unease, which is often where worthwhile thinking begins.
The Defense Department, Oura’s largest customer, now provides rings to certain soldiers and civil servants as an employee benefit. In Congress, they are a hot accessory for representatives and senators as different as Bronx Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Idaho Falls Republican Mike Crapo. Besides buying the rings, lawmakers have gone to bat to protect Oura from Chinese and Indian competitors. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has made wearables like the Oura ring part of his Make America Healthy Again movement. He says every American should be sporting one by the end of the decade.
Wearable devices promise knowledge. That promise is seductive because it appears modest. A ring measures sleep, my watch measures heart rate, and sensors measure movement or temperature. Each function is framed as assistance, as clarity, as an expansion of self-understanding. These are framed as tools of wellness. And in many contexts, they are exactly that. They help people notice patterns that might otherwise remain obscure. They can support recovery, discipline, and care.
But something deeper is happening alongside these practical benefits. Wearables do not simply measure bodies. They reorganize attention toward bodies. And attention is never neutral. Attention is ecological. It shapes the environments within which perception unfolds.
From a phenomenological standpoint, the body is not primarily encountered as data. It is lived through sensation, posture, fatigue, hunger, and atmosphere. It is encountered through participation in a world rather than through representation. When Merleau-Ponty writes about embodiment, or when Edith Stein considers empathic access to experience, the body appears as relational presence rather than objectified signal. It is not a dashboard. It is a mode of inhabiting.
Wearable analytics introduce a second layer of encounter. The body becomes statistically legible. One wakes not simply rested or tired, but presented with a readiness score or a determination of “how well” you slept (I, for one, often feel like I’ve slept horribly or really well only to be confronted with a piece of data telling me the opposite at 5:30 AM, and it’s a cognitively confusing way to begin the day). One does not feel stress as tension or agitation alone, but as heart rate variability metrics. Over time, these mediated interpretations begin to compete with lived sensation as arbiters of truth.
This does not eliminate embodiment. But it does refract it.
The ecological question then emerges:
What happens when the perception of self becomes infrastructurally mediated?
What kind of attentional environment forms when intimate experience is continuously translated into an extractable signal?
Here, the conversation moves beyond individual devices toward systems. Data does not remain local. It circulates through platforms, institutions, markets, and governance structures (thanks, Peter Thiel). Even when anonymized or ethically managed, biometric data participates in networks far larger than the individual body from which it originates. Bodies become nodes in informational ecologies.
From the standpoint of ecological intentionality, agency is never isolated. It arises through relational entanglements among bodies, technologies, institutions, and environments. Wearables intensify these entanglements. They fold biological rhythms into digital infrastructures, making physiological processes part of broader technological assemblages.
This is neither purely dystopian nor purely emancipatory. It is transformation.
There are real gains to be acknowledged. Preventive medicine. Behavioral insight. Personalized health awareness. These are not trivial developments. But the transformation also raises subtle spiritual and philosophical questions. When self-knowledge becomes increasingly mediated through algorithmic interpretation, how does trust in lived experience shift? When bodily awareness is quantified, what happens to contemplative attention? When vitality is scored, how does one relate to vulnerability?
Traditions of spiritual discipline have long cultivated attentiveness to breath, posture, hunger, fatigue, and interior movement. These practices did not seek numerical validation. They sought participatory awareness. The difference is not technological versus pre-technological. It is representational awareness versus relational awareness.
This distinction matters because the stakes are ecological. Attention shapes behavior. Behavior shapes environments. Environments shape futures.
If we come to understand our bodies primarily through optimization metrics, we risk narrowing our interpretive field to efficiency and performance. But if wearable technologies are held within a wider horizon of relational awareness, they may instead become companions to reflection rather than replacements for perception.
The task ahead is not rejection nor surrender. It is integration with discernment.
We should ask:
How do we use measurement without being defined by it?
How do we allow data to inform perception without displacing embodied knowing?
How do we remain addressable by the more-than-human world when our awareness is increasingly mediated through technological mirrors?
These questions are not just policy or privacy debates. They are spiritual and ecological inquiries. They concern how persons inhabit bodies within technological worlds.
Unease, in this light, becomes instructive. It signals the presence of transformation that has not yet been fully metabolized into understanding. It invites patience rather than reaction. And perhaps most importantly, it calls us back toward attentional practices capable of holding complexity without collapsing into certainty.
The future of wearable technology will not be determined only by engineers, legislators, or markets (or the military-industrial complex, hopefully). It will also be shaped by how individuals cultivate awareness of their own embodiment within relational ecologies.
And that work begins, as it often does, by noticing how we are already being measured… and how we choose to measure what matters.