Quantifying the Specific Contribution of Wearable and Biomarker Data to Patient Outcomes

Scott Fears, MD, chief medical officer at Amae Health and professor of psychiatry at UCLA, discussed early outcomes from Amae Health's care model and why he believes psychiatric medicine is only now positioned to make clinical use of decades of accumulated patient data.

Recently, Amae Health announced they are partnering with Google Health Enterprise to incorporate wearable-derived behavioral data into its precision psychiatry care model.^1,2

Fears said Amae Health has seen substantial reductions in rehospitalization among the patients it treats, but cautioned that the model currently combines many interventions at once, making it difficult to isolate which components are driving the improvement. What Amae Health needs to build next, he said, is the ability to quantify the specific contribution of wearable and biomarker data to those outcomes over time, particularly in relapse prevention. Demonstrating that a biomarker-informed system prevents relapses and reduces cost, Fears said, is the evidence base needed to support a reimbursement structure that would fund continued investment in this technology.

Fears situated that effort within a longer arc. He finished graduate school in the late 1990s, he said, during the early excitement around the "data age," but argued that psychiatric medicine has only recently developed the computational tools, namely machine learning and AI, capable of identifying meaningful patterns in that accumulated information. He described the field as being at the start of a period of exponential growth in data-driven capability.

Wearable and voice biomarkers are the current focus, Fears said, but he expects genetics to be integrated into this same data platform going forward. He noted that genetic testing already has meaningful clinical utility in some cancers but has not yet translated into similar clinical value in mental health. Neuroimaging and genetics, he said, have deepened basic-science understanding of psychiatric illness without yet providing much clinical direction. Fears argued that the platform now being built, capable of integrating wearable, voice, genetic, and other data streams together, is what will finally allow that underlying science to become clinically actionable.

"I believe we're at a place now where, a decade from now, we really will be able to look back and say the information age has come to a place where we can actually use it and interpret this information in a way that changes people's lives in a meaningful way," Fears said.

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