Tech and Wellness Will Combine Like Never Before in 2025, but Will We Benefit?

Today’s technology has made it easier than ever for us to gain insight into what’s going on under our skin. The question remains: Are we going deep enough?

Wearable health trackers made available to consumers, like smartwatches and smart rings, continue to refine their research into how our bodies function. Continuous glucose monitors — which officially hit the “mainstream” wellness market in the US in 2024 with clearance for people without diabetes — offer an even more intimate look at our metabolic health, a lofty yet neglected aspect for most Americans.

As we fill our carts with the latest tech and pay money for apps in the name of good health, are we actually getting healthier? In some cases, yes. It’s possible, even likely, that we can’t yet track what we need to track the most — at least, not now. 

Is tech distracting us from the root of our health problems?

Dr. Dave Rabin, a neuroscientist and psychiatrist, has spent 20 years studying stress and what he calls “chronic burnout.” He has experience in unconventional therapy spaces like psychedelic research, and he’s currently the medical director of Apollo Neuro, a wearable company that aims to increase your well-being by sending vibrating pulses to your skin. His work has led him to believe unprocessed trauma is at the root of most of our health problems, mental and physical. He describes unprocessed trauma as at least one intense or meaningful challenging experience after which you are not given any support.

According to Rabin, the way most people currently use tech isn’t doing us any favors, and more work is needed to reach the goal of getting under the surface of our health problems. Here’s why: the purpose and goal behind much of the consumer tech and apps on the market are to sell us stuff and “distract us” from our feelings. Plus, we may have weaved ourselves into unprocessed stress response after stress response under a pile of notifications from our smartphones, health-tracking apps and all the rest that dominate our headspace and time. Yes, even in the name of good health. 

“Ultimately, we are training ourselves to have more stress response — people are not being taught to use it safely,” Rabin said. “Everything about healing starts with feeling your feelings, facing your pain and not avoiding it.”

The argument could be made that we face pain (physical or mental) every time we open an app or strap on a wearable meant to help us track our health or improve our well-being. Truly being “healthier” requires that we connect our own dots and make sure we are giving attention to the wellness trends that actually serve up our version of “well” — whatever that is.

As we look ahead to a healthier 2025, we should continue asking ourselves whether our tech is actively improving our lives or pulling us away from them. We should also consider asking fewer questions about what technology exists to help us get healthier and more questions about how and whether to use it in the first place. Chances are we have a good toolkit for better health already built in.

“Most people think of their smartphones and their tech as something that stresses them out, but that’s not what technology should be doing,” Rabin said. “Technology should be in service of humanity.”

Here are some of the buzziest trends worth watching in 2025 and how to make them meaningful to your health. 

Healthy brain, healthy aging: will tech connect the dots?

Interest in “healthy aging,” an umbrella term for spending more time being healthy rather than just living long, was more than a buzzword in 2024 — it was a whole movement. In 2025, we may expect healthy aging to inch its way into more spaces like supplements, but one area we should be looking at to keep up with the healthy aging Joneses is brain health. Dr. Daniel Friedman, a neurologist at NYU Langone Health and director of the Division of Epilepsy, called advancements in tech in the name of brain health an “interesting area of research” but one that’s not quite fully formed.

Specifically, Friedman pointed to research into how people use phones and consumer devices — how fast they type, how they interact with them and even the complexity of the words they type — as “early predictors” of neurocognitive problems such as dementia. 

Researchers at Dartmouth, for example, developed an app called RealVision that tracks how users interact with their phone through eye movement and prompt responsiveness, potentially identifying dementia in its early days. Other research published in 2024 also looked at information collected from smartphones, finding older adults at risk of dementia based on wayfinding data (i.e., navigating around). 

It may take some time for tech advancements to hit consumer devices in a way that will actually benefit people’s lives in terms of actionable health advice.

“You’d probably be pissed off and panicked if your phone told you, ‘Hey, by the way, you’re at 20% risk of developing dementia in the next 10 years,'” Friedman said.

In the meantime, he stresses the importance of staying on top of modifiable health factors we know can tip the scale in terms of dementia or brain health risk. These include getting adequate sleep, moving your body regularly, getting regular check-ups for hearing and vision health to ensure your brain receives the type of information it needs to stay busy and eating a nutritious diet. 

Fuel for the mind and body: an ongoing focus on nutrition 

The importance of a well-rounded diet full of essential nutrients is as old as time, but 2024 saw a particular burst of interest in nutrition and increased attention around the idea of “food as medicine.” 

2025 will only build on this. This year, for example, we’ll see a revision of the dietary guidelines in the US, which will mostly be a model of eating that’s been shown to support a healthy heart, with a limited intake of foods like red meat and ultra-processed foods. The new guidelines have an emphasis on plant-based proteins, such as beans and lentils, and vegetables and fruits. 

Another area of nutrition and all-around wellness that will continue to build on itself in 2025 is the gut microbiome. This area continues to gain momentum due to its link to metabolic health, skin health and more. Genetics, medication and lifestyle factors influence gut health, but the number-one determining factor is nutrition and the foods we eat. 

Federica Amati, clinical medicine research scientist and head nutritionist for the health science and at-home gut test company ZOE, told us that upcoming research in the pipeline will help seal the deal in terms of growing people’s awareness of what they eat and how it impacts their gut health (and therefore, their overall health). 

“We’re getting to a point where we can use the gut microbiome data to understand what people are actually eating,” Amati said. An upcoming partnership by ZOE and Mass General Hospital will explore potential links with specific gut bacteria strains associated with increased risk of colorectal cancer in younger adults. The results could have massive implications for the growing number of people who face this diagnosis. 

Gut health also has a direct link to inflammation, which, month by month, continues to morph not just into a buzzword but a necessary evil that, in many cases, results in or is accompanied by autoimmune or chronic disease, more evil than necessary. Amati explained that inflammation is necessary to help us when we’re sick, to tend to an infection or (in small amounts) in other daily bodily functions. The problem is when it becomes chronic and continues to simmer for months or years, and it’s been associated with cancer, heart disease, diabetes and infertility.

“When we think about metabolic health conditions and we think about chronic disease, inflammation is the fire that spurs it on,” she said. There is a direct link between overall health and solid nutrition, along with minimizing inflammatory foods such as processed fats found in store-bought baked goods, alcohol and red meat, Amati gave as examples. Fiber, as it happens, is beneficial for the gut microbiome and anti-inflammatory. 

It doesn’t have a screen and doesn’t fit our technical definition of tech, but an increased focus on fiber and getting more of it into our diet through whole foods will only gain momentum in 2025. 

“It’s not rocket science, but it’s not happening yet.”

Health as a whole: how to actually feel well in 2025 

Rabin, who works with emotion regulation through his company, says innovation in the emotion-regulating vagus nerve stimulator space is likely in 2025. Perhaps more interestingly, Rabin says that technology in the near future will continue to close some of the health loopholes wearable data can create. 

“You will see more products coming out that are going to utilize a closed-loop AI,” Rabin said.

This means that in the future, we’ll see more health technology that “creates a signature” for our bodies, more directly spelling out what our health data looks like when we’re feeling good and when we’re feeling bad. This may expand on the Apollo and Oura Ring integration, which is already available to blend mind and body by combining strict health metric information such as heart rate variability with anxiety-calming properties. 

Another factor to be mindful of in 2025 is how you’re allowing notifications into your life or how your consumer tech suits you. Dr. Ryan Sultan, a psychiatrist who runs a bioinformatics lab at Columbia University, said that one way to reduce stress around tech is to be mindful of whether it’s helping you stay healthier. It seems simple enough, but how apps are designed doesn’t always make it appear so intuitive. 

“A lot of applications are really just too heavy on the notifications,” Sultan said. 

Should we be relying on technology to help us get healthier in 2025? The answer may depend entirely on whether it’s truly helping us achieve our health goals by bringing us to the bottom of them. The idea that we should look at the root cause of illnesses from a more holistic view, rather than a symptom-oriented one, is relatively new in Western medicine but draws on healing practices from Eastern culture. For example, wellness practices such as breathwork continue to catch on and grow a wealth of evidence for their potential role in anxiety management. 

In 2025, we may have more tech that promises to benefit our health, but that doesn’t mean it’s a miracle cure or that we should use all of it. Despite health tech being produced at a mass scale and made available OTC, health truly does remain personal, and what you use to increase it should be based on what’s best for your body and mind.

In other words, in a world full of stuff that fights for every inch of our eyesight and square inch of our brain, we don’t just deserve to be picky. We owe it to our health.