Bringing Wearable Device Data Into Psychiatric Care

Amae Health recently announced they are partnering with Google Health Enterprise to incorporate wearable-derived behavioral data into its precision psychiatry care model.^1,2 But what tech is preferred?

Scott Fears, MD, chief medical officer at Amae Health and professor of psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), discussed the growing role of consumer wearable devices in psychiatric assessment and treatment, and the technical hurdles standing in the way of using that data clinically.

Fears, who wears an Oura Ring, a Fitbit, and an Apple Watch simultaneously to compare their outputs, said the eventual goal is device-agnostic data integration: whatever wearable a patient arrives with, clinicians should be able to extract and act on its data. That goal is complicated by how differently these devices perform. Activity tracking is fairly consistent across brands, Fears said, but sleep staging varies considerably from one device to another, meaning clinicians will need large validation datasets specific to each device before they can confidently interpret, for example, an Oura Ring sleep report the way they might a Fitbit one.

Amae Health has standardized on Fitbit for the devices it provides to patients, whom the organization refers to as members. Fears cited 2 reasons: cost and data infrastructure. Regulations governing medical inducement limit the value of items a provider can give a patient at no charge, and Fitbit offers cost-effective options that fit within those limits. Fitbit's data is also the target of a large-scale foundation model effort underway at Google, which Fears referred to as a sensor-data foundation model built on Fitbit's sensor streams. That model is not yet publicly available, he said, but once released it could surface clinically meaningful patterns in wearable data that aren't currently detectable.

Fears said he expects comparable foundation models to eventually emerge for Oura and Apple devices as well, though he noted Apple has been slower than competitors to enter the AI space. He also pointed to the broader expansion of consumer physiologic monitoring, including breath-based devices that estimate whether a person is metabolizing predominantly ketones or carbohydrates, as an example of how metabolic data is becoming increasingly relevant to mental health assessment.

"What I'd like to do is get to the point where, whatever someone walks into the clinic with, we're able to pull that data out and make use of it," Fears said.

Fears connected this trend to Amae Health's broader clinical model, which he described as deliberately blurring the line between physical and mental health care, with a specific focus on metabolic health and insulin resistance as treatment priorities alongside psychiatric symptoms. As wearable devices increasingly capture physiologic signals beyond basic activity and sleep, he said, that data is likely to become more integrated into psychiatric care over time, not just as a proxy for physical health but as direct input to mental health treatment decisions.

Dr Fears is the chief medical officer at Amae Health and a professor of psychiatry at UCLA.

References

1. Amae Health partners with Google Health Enterprise to bring wearable data integration to the treatment of complex mental health conditions. News release. August 4, 2026. Accessed August 4, 2026. https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2026/08/04/3338378/0/en/amae-health-partners-with-google-health-enterprise-to-bring-wearable-data-integration-to-the-treatment-of-complex-mental-health-conditions.html

2. Kuntz L. Bringing wearable data into psychiatric care: Amae Health partners with Google Health Enterprise to improve outcomes. Psychiatric Times. August 4, 2026. https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/view/bringing-wearable-data-into-psychiatric-care-amae-health-partners-with-google-health-enterprise-to-improve-outcomes