Key Takeaways:
- Wearables are widely adopted and increasingly medical-grade.
- ROOK simplifies integration across multiple devices with a single API/SDK.
- Most value comes in healthcare, chronic disease management, and real-world evidence studies.
- Compliance, data standardization, and human error remain key challenges.
- Personalized baselines and correlations turn raw data into actionable insights.
- Continuous data streams are the next frontier for predictive, preventive care.
In what ways is wearable and sensor data driving innovation in HealthTech, and which trends should startups watch as usage grows?
Jonas: Wearable and sensor data is driving some really exciting change in HealthTech. What started in fitness and wellness is rapidly moving toward true medical-grade use. The biggest trend is mass adoption today, almost everyone carries or wears a device that tracks health data. We’re also seeing “everything” become wearable: not just smartwatches or rings, but even smartphones acting as health sensors. At the same time, accuracy is improving fast, with more features gaining FDA clearance and approaching medical-device standards. Long term, most wearables will likely function as medical devices. Another major shift is reimbursement. New CPT codes around remote patient monitoring, hospital-at-home, and decentralized care are making these models financially viable. Combined with an aging population and a growing need to care for baby boomers, this creates huge momentum toward decentralized healthcare. For startups, wearable data is a powerful foundation to build new services right now and we’re still at the very beginning of that growth curve.
How does ROOK help startups integrate data from multiple wearable devices and make it actionable?
Jonas: We actually ran into this problem ourselves. Integrating multiple wearables is a mess: different APIs, SDKs, data formats, labels, and sampling frequencies. It’s exhausting and frustrating for any startup to manage. That’s why we built ROOK. Instead of integrating with every wearable individually, startups integrate once with ROOK. From there, they can access data from all their users, regardless of whether someone is using a smart garment, an Oura ring, or a Whoop device. In short, ROOK turns many complex integrations into a single, scalable one. Technically, it’s an API and SDK that abstracts all that complexity and lets startups focus on actually using the data, not fighting with it.
Which industries and use cases are seeing the most value from wearable data today?
Jonas: Our main verticals are fitness and wellness, healthcare, and insurance. Within healthcare, most demand comes from digital health, especially remote patient monitoring, hospital-at-home, and chronic disease management. We work a lot with conditions like obesity, diabetes, opioid recovery, and other long-term illnesses. Wearable data is most powerful pre- and post-diagnosis: helping predict or prevent disease, and supporting patients in managing conditions once they’re diagnosed. It acts as a daily check-in that helps improve quality of life over time. We also see growing interest from pharma, particularly in real-world data collection and Phase IV studies, where “bring your own device” models make multi-device data integration especially valuable.
What are the biggest data and compliance challenges in working with wearable data, and how can companies address them?
Jonas: There are still plenty of challenges when working with wearable data. Compliance is a big one, companies need to meet regulations like HIPAA in the US, GDPR in Europe, and other regional standards. These are manageable, but they require careful processes. At ROOK, compliance is built in from the start, which removes a major burden for startups. Beyond regulation, data handling is often the hardest part. Different devices collect, calculate, and sync data in different ways, metrics like HRV, for example, aren’t standardized. Normalizing that data into a single, reliable format across brands is complex. Then there’s human error. People forget to wear devices, batteries die, or data drops out mid-measurement. From a health perspective, it’s not always clear whether a missing signal indicates a real issue or just a device problem. Managing these interruptions and the logistics around devices is still a major challenge in the space.
How can teams build products that generate actionable insights from wearable streams, and what guidance does ROOK offer for this?
Jonas: The most effective starting point is building a personalized baseline for each user e.g. sleep, resting heart rate, blood pressure, glucose levels, and more. Once you understand what’s normal for someone, you can detect deviations, trigger alerts, prompt check-ins, and guide users back to baseline or toward improvement. Preventing deterioration is just as important as driving progress. Beyond baselines, correlation is key. Take diabetes as an example: glucose is influenced by activity, sleep, recovery, and stress, and those effects are highly individual. A short walk might significantly impact one person’s glucose levels and barely affect another’s. Understanding these relationships on a personalized level is where real value emerges. By aggregating wearable data and applying analytics and AI, teams can quickly identify what truly matters for each user whether that’s condition management, elderly care, fall detection, or emergency monitoring and turn raw data into insights that help people live better, healthier lives.
** **What is ROOK’s business model, and how global is your reach?
Jonas: ROOK is 100% B2B. We work with HealthTech, FitnessTech, and InsurTech companies that need access to wearable data from their users or patients. Clients integrate ROOK once, and we operate on a tiered SaaS API licensing model. Pricing is based on user volume specifically the number of active users or patients using the solution. We’re global. About 60% of our customers are in the US and Europe, our strongest markets, but we also work with companies across Latin America, India, Australia, Japan, Singapore, and parts of Africa, including Nigeria. At this point, we have customers on every continent and solid experience handling wearable data within different regional and regulatory contexts.
In clinical studies or real-world evidence collection, how can wearable data be used most effectively, and what do startups often overlook?
Jonas: Clinical studies are highly regulated, so protocol design is key. When using wearable data, it’s crucial to focus only on relevant, controllable metrics, and account for human error and device logistics ensuring participants wear devices and adhere to the study. Wearables offer two major opportunities: you can tap into existing user pools or provide devices for a decentralized study. Passive data collection drastically improves adherence compared to traditional methods like daily blood pressure cuffs or clinic visits. The biggest caution is scope: adding too many devices, brands, or metrics makes studies harder to control. Careful protocol design ensures that the study remains feasible, reliable, and truly actionable.
Can you share examples where ROOK helped companies accelerate innovation, boost engagement, or scale wearable data use?
Jonas: We work with a wide range of companies from Fortune 50 retailers to hospital chains and fitness or longevity apps. One hospital chain in India uses ROOK to monitor patients remotely after treatment or surgery. With remote rehabilitation tracking, they reduced readmissions by 18%, which translates into massive cost savings per patient. In the longevity space, wearable data drives daily engagement and accountability. Companies pull metrics from smart scales, wearables, and blood pressure cuffs to calculate things like biological age, which fuels user engagement and even upsells for supplements or premium offerings. So, depending on the use case, ROOK helps either reduce costs, improve outcomes, or increase revenue by leveraging wearable data effectively.
What advice would you give to startups and scaleups looking to leverage wearable data efficiently while planning for growth?
Jonas: My advice is to focus on your core business and innovation. Integrating and maintaining wearable data is important, but for most companies, it’s not their core strength. Just like you wouldn’t build your own payment system you’d use Stripe or another trusted tool, you can rely on platforms like ROOK to handle the wearable integration. This way, you can scale your unique value and innovation on top of reliable infrastructure, instead of spending time reinventing solutions that already exist. Focus on your secret sauce, not on the basics someone else can handle.
** **Is there an important topic we haven’t covered?
Jonas: We’re strong advocates for continuous data in healthcare, but it’s still challenging. Continuous glucose monitors have paved the way, but most healthcare systems rely on static snapshots lab tests or single readings. Electronic health records and physician workflows aren’t yet designed to handle continuous streams. To make continuous data useful, we need systems that highlight the most important signals, so providers aren’t overwhelmed. This kind of data is essential for the “Medicine 3.0” wave focused on prevention, prediction, and personalized care. We see it as critical to push healthcare toward leveraging continuous data effectively.
R2GConnect: Thank you for the insights, Jonas.
Looking to scale wearable data in your HealthTech product?
Check out ROOK's exclusive offers designed to help you assess integrations, test quickly, and scale wearable data with confidence.
- Wearable Health Data Workshop (2 sessions) here
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- Scaling Wearable Data in Health-Tech here
- 30 days Free Trial Access for Wearable Data API + Free Consultation here
- How to use wearable data in clinical studies - Workshop and joined pilot here Deadline to apply : April 30, 2026