A Wearable on Every American: Empowerment or Surveillance?

When Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services, announced his plan to ensure that every American wears a health-tracking device within four years, the proposal immediately sparked debate. On the one hand, wearables offer empowerment, providing individuals with real-time insights into their health, supporting preventive care, and encouraging healthier daily choices. On the other hand, such a sweeping initiative raises significant concerns about privacy, surveillance, data ownership, and the role of government in personal health decisions. The idea forces us to confront both the transformative potential of large-scale wearable adoption and the risks of overreach if protections are not in place. With billions of new data points generated daily, questions about storage, interoperability, and compliance become central. Without strong frameworks, the initiative could just as easily undermine trust as it could improve outcomes. We partially covered that in our digital health literacy blog post! 

In this blog, we explore what this new policy means for health data management, data protection and privacy, and the future of wearables. We will also outline the vision behind the proposal, the opportunities and risks it presents, lessons from global privacy frameworks, and what the future of wearables could look like.

The Vision Behind Nationwide Wearables

The initiative is part of Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) agenda. Its core premise is simple yet ambitious: prevention is cheaper and more effective than treatment. By equipping every citizen with a wearable, policymakers envision a population empowered to monitor a broad range of health metrics, including activity levels, diet, glucose fluctuations, sleep quality, and cardiovascular health. The goal is to shift the national healthcare system away from expensive, reactive treatment models and toward proactive, continuous self‑management of health. This truly captures the idea of proactive healthcare, we have covered it in details here! 

Supporters emphasize several potential benefits:

• Reduced burden on providers: Hospitals and primary care teams could catch problems earlier and avoid costly interventions.
• Lower healthcare costs: Billions could be saved by preventing or mitigating chronic conditions such as diabetes and heart disease. Check our blog post on how prevention can reduce healthcare costs here! 
• Healthier routines: Daily monitoring would encourage more consistent exercise, balanced nutrition, and better sleep.
• Informed policy-making: Large datasets could guide public health decisions, resource allocation, and targeted interventions. Yet, as with every large‑scale data project, execution is as critical as intent. The challenge lies in creating equitable access to devices, ensuring the accuracy of data across different demographics, and building governance structures that inspire trust while still delivering on the promise of better health outcomes. All of these aspects hevaily realy on population’s digital health literacy!

How Can Health Data Be Managed Effectively?

Wearables generate enormous volumes of data—continuous heart rate streams, sleep cycles, glucose monitoring, stress signals, and beyond. Managing this data responsibly requires robust systems for:

• Collection and storage: Infrastructure capable of handling billions of daily data points, with scalable cloud environments, strong encryption, and redundancy to guarantee availability.
• Integration: Seamlessly combining wearable outputs with EHRs, lab results, imaging systems, and claims data while resolving differences in formats, coding systems, and time stamps.
• Analysis: Applying AI, machine learning, and advanced statistical tools to detect patterns, forecast risks, optimize treatment pathways, and inform both individual and population-level interventions.
• Governance: Establishing clear rules for who owns, controls, and benefits from the data, including frameworks for consent management, audit trails, role-based access, and compliance with HIPAA, GDPR, and other regulations.

In addition, health data management at this scale requires careful attention to interoperability standards, real-time quality assurance, and ethical considerations such as bias detection in algorithms. Without strong oversight, a project of this scope risks collapsing under its own weight either by creating unmanageable technical complexity, producing misleading insights, or eroding public trust through weak governance and opaque data practices. For more information on managing multiple wearable APIs, check our blog post here! 

Opportunities of Wearable Intergation 

When implemented well, wearable programs offer genuine opportunities that extend far beyond step counting or calorie tracking They can serve as continuous health companions, enabling individuals, clinicians, and insurers to act on reliable, real-time information rather than fragmented or outdated records. 

• Personalized health insights: Daily nudges, longitudinal trend analysis, and individualized feedback loops can guide healthier behavior, improve adherence to treatment plans, and empower people to recognize patterns they might otherwise miss.
• Preventive care: Early detection of risk factors such as irregular heart rhythms, sleep apnea patterns, or prolonged inactivity reduces costly chronic disease escalation and allows for interventions before conditions worsen.
• Increased engagement: Patients become active participants, not passive recipients, in their health journey. Engaged users are more likely to follow medical advice, attend preventive screenings, and adopt sustainable lifestyle changes.
• Data democratization: Individuals gain ownership over a larger portion of their health information, which they can share selectively with providers, insurers, or family members. This supports informed decision-making and strengthens the patient-provider relationship.
• Population-level insights: Aggregated wearable data can help public health authorities and insurers identify at-risk groups, monitor community-level health trends, and design more effective prevention programs.

The promise is clear: widespread adoption of wearables has the potential to redefine the relationship between citizens and the healthcare system, making healthcare more participatory, proactive, and data-driven. All of this is achievable when several wearable APIs are managed in the correct way. 

What Risks and Surveillance Concerns Do Wearables Raise?

While nationwide wearable adoption offers great potential, it also introduces systemic risks that must be considered carefully:

• HIPAA gaps: Most wearable data falls outside traditional U.S. health privacy laws, leaving large volumes of sensitive information unprotected by existing frameworks.
• Potential misuse: Insurers or employers could leverage this data in ways that penalize individuals for lifestyle choices or health outcomes, whether intentionally or inadvertently, raising ethical and legal questions.
• Surveillance creep: Centralized datasets can open the door to overreach by both corporations and government entities. Health information could be repurposed for employment screening, law enforcement, or even social monitoring if not strictly limited.
• Trust erosion: Without clear safeguards and transparent governance, individuals may feel monitored rather than empowered, undermining adoption and participation in the program.
• Equity challenges: Unequal data accuracy across different demographics, or uneven access to devices, may reinforce health disparities instead of reducing them.

The fear is not unfounded: once the infrastructure for mass data collection is in place, the temptation to expand its use beyond health purposes grows stronger. Historical precedents show that large datasets often attract new applications, sometimes far removed from their original intent. These risks highlight the importance of rigorous data protection, strong oversight, and continuous dialogue with the public to ensure wearables enhance empowerment rather than erode fundamental rights.

How Thryve Powers Wearable Integration 

Kennedy’s proposal to put a wearable on every American embodies both the best and worst possibilities of digital health. It could empower individuals with unprecedented control over their wellbeing, or it could erode privacy and trust if mishandled. The deciding factor will be how the U.S. approaches health data management, privacy safeguards, and governance.

To unlock the full promise of wearables, empowerment must come with trust. And trust is built on transparency, equity, and strong protections for data rights. That when Thryve steps in. With our API, we provide health organizations with: 

• Seamless Device Integration: Easily connect over 500 other health monitoring devices to your platform, eliminating the need for multiple integrations.
• Standardized Biometric Models: Automatically harmonize biometric data streams, including heart rate, sleep metrics, skin temperature, activity levels, and HRV, making the data actionable and consistent across devices.
• GDPR-Compliant Infrastructure: Ensure full compliance with international privacy and security standards, including GDPR and HIPAA. All data is securely encrypted and managed according to the highest privacy requirements.  

Curious how your organization can navigate the balance between wearable innovation and privacy protection?

Book a demo with Thryve to learn how we transform wearable health data into secure, actionable insights!