CES loves a promise.
This year, the promise was health.
AI wearables that claim to read your heart through your feet.
Hormone trackers that say they know your body better than you do.
Chatbots offering medical guidance with the confidence of a seasoned doctor and the training of a dataset.
It all looked impressive at the Consumer Electronics Show.
It also raised a quiet but important question.
Just because technology can measure something, should it?
Data feels powerful. That does not make it wise.
Health wearables sell certainty.
Numbers.
Graphs.
Insights.
What they rarely sell is context.
AI is excellent at spotting patterns.
It is also excellent at being wrong in very convincing ways.
When these tools move directly into consumers’ hands, the danger is not that people will ignore doctors.
It is that they will trust a device before they ever talk to one.
Confidence without accountability is not care.
It is risk wearing a sleek design.
Fewer rules do not mean fewer consequences
At CES, the Food and Drug Administration signaled it would ease oversight on certain wellness devices. The intent is to speed innovation.
But when health tech moves faster than guardrails, responsibility does not disappear.
It just shifts quietly onto the user.
If a device influences decisions about fertility, heart health, or medication timing, low risk becomes a very flexible phrase.
The privacy problem hiding in plain sight
Here is the part most people miss.
Much of the data collected by consumer health devices is not protected like medical records. It can live outside healthcare laws. It can travel. It can be reused.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has been clear about this. If you want to know where your data goes, be prepared to read a lot of fine print and still feel unsure.
Health data feels deeply personal.
Legally, it often is not treated that way.
That gap matters.
A tool is still just a tool
AI wearables can be helpful.
They can surface patterns.
They can help people ask better questions.
They can increase access where systems fall short.
But they are not doctors.
They do not carry responsibility.
They do not sit with consequences.
The real risk is not innovation.
It is overreliance.
As health technology moves closer to our bodies and our families, trust should be earned slowly, not assumed quickly.
Smart is not the same as safe.
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