Hey,
It’s Pete Matheson with a new issue of Experiments in Progress.
There’s a weird point you hit with health tech where you stop buying “health improvements” and start buying dashboards.
Some of this stuff genuinely improves your life. Some of it just gives you more graphs to ignore.
So this week, I wanted to break down:
what actually helped me, what didn’t, and which health gadgets I’d genuinely spend my own money on again.
🧠 Health Gadgets: What Actually Improved My Health
So here’s my honest breakdown of what actually works.
🛏️ 8 Sleep: very good
The 8 Sleep is one of those products I spent years saying “This is too expensive. No normal person should buy this.”
…and then eventually became the exact person recommending it.
It’s basically a temperature-controlled mattress cover that actively heats or cools your bed throughout the night. It works ridiculously well.
Especially if:
you sleep hot
your partner sleeps cold
your room temperature changes constantly
you wake up overheating at 3am
you struggle with sleep consistency
The underrated part is the split temperature system. One side of the bed can be freezing, the other can be warm.
The annoying part:
it’s expensive
there’s a subscription
replacing it later will hurt financially
That’s probably the strongest endorsement I can give any health gadget.
Source: Tom’s Guide
⌚ Smartwatches, rings & recovery trackers
At one point I was wearing:
Apple Watch
WHOOP
smart ring
other fitness trackers
…and eventually realised that I barely looked at most of the data anymore.
📊 collecting data is easier than actually changing behaviour.
After a while, most recovery scores start telling you things you already know: slept badly, stressed, overtrained, drank too much caffeine, need rest.
Ironically, I mostly still wear an Apple Watch because of my health insurance.
Vitality tracks workouts/activity through supported devices and rewards you with points and perks.
💍 Smart Rings: cool in theory, less useful in practice
The hardware is genuinely impressive but I found myself checking the data way less than I expected.
The novelty wears off pretty quickly once you already understand your patterns.
If you’ve never tracked sleep/recovery before, they can be useful for:
understanding sleep quality
spotting stress patterns
seeing recovery trends
improving consistency
🩸 CGMs (continuous glucose monitors)
These are the little glucose monitors you stick on your arm for ~2 weeks.
Originally they were mainly for diabetics. Now companies like Ultrahuman are pushing them into mainstream health tracking.
For a short-term experiment I think they’re genuinely useful.
In 2-4 weeks you will start seeing:
what foods spike your glucose
how sleep impacts blood sugar
what stress does to your body
why certain meals make you crash
how meal order changes energy levels
You start realising your body behaves very differently than you assumed.
Source: InventUM
🧪 Blood testing + AI is quietly becoming huge
One area I think is massively underrated:
Uploading blood test results into AI-powered health apps.
If you combine:
bloodwork
sleep data
nutrition tracking
workout history
recovery trends
glucose data
…AI can already help organise and interpret this better than most people can manually.
You can throw data into Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT and get:
workout recommendations
nutrition suggestions
recovery insights
pattern analysis
simplified explanations
A lot of platforms now let you upload:
blood panels
biomarkers
health reports
lab results
…and then analyse trends automatically.
WHOOP, Ultrahuman and others are starting to move heavily in this direction.
We’re getting very close to AI becoming the actual health dashboard layer across everything.
🎯My honest health gadget buying guide
What health gadget has actually improved your life the most?
📱 Enjoying this newsletter? Share it with a friend who’s as obsessed with tech as you are:
In this video, I’m testing LG’s new 39-inch UltraGear 5K2K OLED — a curved ultrawide gaming monitor built around LG’s latest 4th gen tandem OLED panel.
I think this might be the new sweet spot for a lot of people.
Whether 39” makes more sense than last year’s 45” model
5K2K resolution and why it matters for productivity
Real-world OLED brightness, HDR and colour accuracy
Burn-in concerns and LG’s warranty approach
AI upscaling and AI sound features tested
Mac vs Windows compatibility
PC + console gaming performance impressions
Whether this is actually worth buying in 2026
and more…