Empowered or Overwhelmed? Wearable Health Technologies and Consumer Well‐Being in the Context of Consumer–Physician Interactions

Wearable health technologies (WHTs) increasingly enable continuous, consumer‐driven health monitoring, yet healthcare systems remain organized around episodic, reactive care. This research examines how this misalignment shapes consumer well‐being by integrating consumer and physician perspectives on wearable‐generated data. Study 1 draws on interviews with wearable users and Study 2 involves practicing physicians. Across the two studies, the authors identify four consumer tensions and four parallel physician tensions that emerge in response to continuous health data within episodic care systems. Together, these findings reveal a guidance infrastructure gap, a term coined to describe the absence of interpretive, relational, and system‐level support needed to make continuous data meaningful. The findings show that WHTs influence consumer well‐being not through data access alone, but through the presence or absence of guidance infrastructure that shapes how consumers and providers interpret, navigate, and act on continuous health data.