Wearable Fitness Tech in 2026: Expert Insights from Domenic Angelino

Wearable technology has become an important part of everyday life. From tracking workouts and heart rate to monitoring sleep and recovery, modern smartwatches and fitness trackers offer a wide range of health features. But with so many brands and marketing claims, it can be difficult to know which features are truly useful.

To help our readers make informed decisions, DeviceDecode spoke with Domenic Angelino, Chief Exercise Scientist at FitCraft. In this exclusive interview, he shares his thoughts on wearable fitness technology, common mistakes users make, the future of AI-powered wearables, and which fitness tracker he recommends.

Below are Domenic Angelino's responses to DeviceDecode's questions, shared exclusively for our readers.

Which wearable fitness features do you think are genuinely useful, and which are mostly marketing?

The wearable fitness tech that's most useful for you will depend on your particular goals, as well as what you personally struggle with the most. If you find there's something that you have a hard time keeping track of or manually measuring, wearable tech can automatically solve that problem for you. It prevents you from having missing data points when evaluating how effective your exercise is at helping you improve your health and achieve whatever fitness goals you're working towards. For example, some people forget to track how long their cardio workouts actually are. If you're already wearing a standard wearable, you can retroactively go back and look at the period of time where your heart rate was elevated to figure it out.

If you're someone who is already on top of manually tracking all of the things that a fitness tracker can help you automate, there are plenty of other factors that provide you with helpful information that you won't easily be able to get elsewhere. Heart Rate Variability (HRV) is something that many modern wearables track and can provide you with valuable information about how fatigued your body is. It can help you get ahead of overtraining, since if your Heart Rate Variability suggests you're more fatigued than normal, you can take steps in advance to lower your training volume, instead of reacting to overtraining after the fact. Which is what people normally do.

HRV itself is really just a measure of how much the time between your heartbeats varies. If you're more fatigued it'll be lower, if you're more well-rested, it'll be higher.

Another thing that makes a big difference is sleep quality evaluation. Plenty of fitness tech on the mark is able to roughly measure how well you sleep based on factors like total sleep duration, the specific times you go to sleep, the duration of different sleep phases, and more. This is extremely helpful because sleep is something that people often do not otherwise have great objective ways to measure already built into their life. And, sleep affects your health and fitness dramatically. If your sleep is poor, your workout quality will also go down.

The things that are often more market-y in fitness tech are often just overstatements of the predictive ability of a wearable. They often don't come out of nowhere. For example, plenty of wearables claim they are able to accurately track your hydration status. This is roughly true, but not in as precise a way as marketing may make it seem. The way it usually works is that sweat sensors collect sweat on your skin to measure sweat rate, sweat volume, and electrolyte concentration. This information is plugged into a formula that makes a guess about the hydration state of your body based on the assumption that the small sample of sweat it collected is representative of what's going on throughout your whole body.

Sometimes another method of hydration evaluation is used, involving bioimpedance sensors, which are the type of things you find in those handheld BIA devices that measure your body fat at the gym. They basically send a tiny electrical current through your body's tissue and test how long it takes to get to the other side. Since electricity travels faster through water, the time it takes for the signal to travel can be used to roughly predict how much water was in the path. And that can then be used to predict total body water concentration.

The science behind both of these things is pretty solid, but it can only give you a rough ballpark idea of what's going on in your body. Plus, there are a lot of other variables that can mess with the results. So it's not as accurate as many companies make it seem. Though it is still useful in telling you the general direction your hydration status is heading in over time.

What are the biggest mistakes people make when relying on fitness trackers or smartwatches?

The biggest mistake people make is assuming that trackers are infallible. All trackers rely on assumptions. Different assumptions for different variables. And if those assumptions are not true during the measurement period, you'll get results that are totally misleading. This can get pretty complicated, but it's easy to understand if you think of it through a really simple example. Imagine you tell your wearable that you are going for a high-intensity run. But, instead, you do a casual yoga class. The wearable will track your heart rate and report on your run quality, thinking that you did really poorly. The assumption didn't hold, so the prediction about what this means for your exercise session quality is totally off. It's the same thing for pretty much all variables that wearables track, just usually applied to physiologic factors. For example, bioelectrical impedance-based wearables that are used to measure body fat percent can get totally thrown off if you assess your body fat after a workout where you sweat a lot because the prediction equations they rely on assume your hydration levels are around your baseline.

What trends do you expect to see in wearable technology over the next 2–3 years?

I'd expect to see a lot more AI integration. In the sense that AI can help interpret what findings mean and therefore give people more detailed insights into what the data their wearable collects actually means for their personal use case. And also in the sense that AI integrated with wearables will be able to give tailored recommendations to users based on their data, making the tech far more practical. The trouble with having access to a lot of data is normally that most people don't know how to make the most of it, don't have the time to do so, or simply aren't motivated enough. AI integration addresses those barriers pretty directly because it evaluates a bunch of metrics, and how those metrics interact with one another, and then tells you what you should do with that information in an easy to understand and convenient way.

Which smartwatch or fitness tracker do you currently recommend for most users, and why?

Currently, I recommend the Fitbit. Main reason is that it's early in terms of effective AI integration. Google owns Gemini, one of the leading AI models at the moment. So they're able to do a lot with wearables they make in-house.

Final Thoughts

Wearable technology continues to evolve rapidly, with AI becoming an increasingly important part of modern smartwatches and fitness trackers. As Domenic Angelino explains, the best wearable devices are those that provide meaningful health insights rather than relying on marketing claims alone.

Whether you're a fitness enthusiast or simply looking for a smartwatch to support a healthier lifestyle, understanding how these features work can help you make a more informed buying decision.

We would like to thank Domenic Angelino for sharing his valuable insights with DeviceDecode. His experience in exercise science and wearable technology provides readers with a practical perspective on choosing smarter fitness devices and understanding where wearable technology is heading in the years ahead.

About Domenic Angelino

Domenic Angelino is an expert personal trainer, exercise science SME, Digital health SME, and fitness SME who has worked across many corners of the fitness and wellness industry. As an expert health and wellness consultant, he has supported fitness apps, fitness websites, CEOs, fitness influencers, athletes, research teams, and educational institutions, bringing value to top companies, public figures, and organizations through a mix of extensive education and experience. His work has spanned fitness research consulting, exercise science consulting, human performance consulting, and fitness product consulting.

Domenic currently serves as Chief Exercise Scientist at FitCraft, where he leads the science behind engineering a gamified fitness experience. He previously served as Lead Exercise Scientist and Head Coach at FitnessAI and has continued pushing applied health AI forward through work with digital health AI and human performance labs.

Connect with Domenic:

• FitCraft: https://getfitcraft.com
• Website: https://domenicangelino.com

Do you use a smartwatch or fitness tracker every day? Which wearable features do you find the most useful? Share your thoughts in the comments below—we'd love to hear your experience.