Connected Health Statistics 2026
By Axis Intelligence Research
Co-author: Jennifer Miller (Digital Health) | Last updated: September 8, 2026 | License: CC BY 4.0
Two in five US adults now use a wearable device to manage their health — but fewer than one in five of those users has ever transferred that data to a clinician. Axis Intelligence Research finds that between 2020 and 2024, connected health adoption rose 10.9 percentage points while the Connected Health Last-Mile Index moved just 1.1 points.
Quick Answer
41.1% of US adults used a wearable device for health management in 2024, up from 30.2% in 2020 — an estimated 108 million people, according to nationally representative HINTS data analyzed by Yale’s Cardiovascular Data Science Lab. Yet 73.4% of those users say they are willing to share that data with a clinician while only 19.2% actually have. Axis Intelligence Research calculates that this means just 7.89% of all US adults transferred wearable health data to a clinician in 2024, up from 4.29% in 2020. On the reimbursed side of the market, nearly 1 million Medicare enrollees received remote patient monitoring in 2024, with program payments exceeding $500 million, per HHS Office of Inspector General.
Key Findings
- Wearable use among US adults rose from 30.2% in 2020 to 41.1% in 2024 — an estimated 79 million to 108 million people — according to Pedroso and colleagues’ survey-weighted analysis of three consecutive Health Information National Trends Survey cycles, published in European Heart Journal – Digital Health in January 2026.
- Axis Intelligence Research finds the Connected Health Last-Mile Index (CHLMI™) rose only 1.1 points between 2020 and 2024, from 39.8 to 40.9, because gains in device adoption were offset by falling daily engagement (50.0% of users in 2020 to 45.0% in 2024) and falling willingness to share data (81.3% to 73.4%).
- Nearly 1 million Medicare enrollees received remote patient monitoring services in 2024, and Medicare payments for those services exceeded $500 million, according to the HHS Office of Inspector General’s August 2025 evaluation OEI-02-23-00261.
- 57% of US adults own at least one wearable or connected health device, and 83% of wearable owners wear theirs five or more days per week, per Rock Health’s 2025 Consumer Adoption of Digital Health Survey, fielded December 1–23, 2025 among 8,000 Census-matched respondents.
- Axis Intelligence Research finds US wearable adoption runs 11.1 percentage points ahead of the EU — 41.1% of US adults in 2024 versus 30% of EU residents aged 16 to 74 in the same year — while within the EU, internet-connected health devices reach only 8% of the population, 3.75 times below general wearable use, per Eurostat’s ICT household survey.
The Connected Health Last-Mile Index (CHLMI™) — 2024 Reading
An original Axis Intelligence Research metric. This figure is not published in this form by any primary source.
Every organization measuring connected health measures one link in the chain. Device manufacturers report units. Survey firms report ownership. Payers report billed encounters. Nobody scores the chain end to end — and the chain is where the value either survives or leaks away.
The Connected Health Last-Mile Index (CHLMI™) scores the full path a consumer health signal must travel to become clinically useful: own the device → use it consistently → be willing to share it → actually transfer it to a clinician. Each stage is scored 0–100 on the observed population percentage, then weighted.
Formula:
CHLMI = (0.20 × Adoption) + (0.25 × Engagement) + (0.20 × Intent) + (0.35 × Clinical Transfer)
Clinical Transfer carries the heaviest weight (0.35) because a signal that never reaches a clinician produces no clinical outcome regardless of how many devices were sold. Engagement (0.25) outranks Adoption (0.20) because an unworn device generates no signal at all. Intent (0.20) is the lightest of the behavioral measures because stated willingness is the weakest predictor of action in this dataset — which the index itself demonstrates.
CHLMI™ inputs and scores
| Stage | Definition | 2020 score | 2024 score | Weight | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Adoption | % of US adults using a wearable for health management | 30.2 | 41.1 | 0.20 | HINTS via Pedroso et al. 2026 |
| Engagement | Daily users as % of all users (Axis-calculated) | 50.0 | 45.0 | 0.25 | Axis calculation on HINTS |
| Intent | % of users willing to share data with clinicians | 81.3 | 73.4 | 0.20 | HINTS via Pedroso et al. 2026 |
| Clinical Transfer | % of users who actually shared data with clinicians | 14.2 | 19.2 | 0.35 | HINTS via Pedroso et al. 2026 |
| CHLMI™ | Composite, 0–100 | 39.8 | 40.9 | 1.00 | Axis Intelligence Research |
Worked arithmetic, 2024: (0.20 × 41.1) + (0.25 × 45.0) + (0.20 × 73.4) + (0.35 × 19.2) = 8.22 + 11.25 + 14.68 + 6.72 = 40.87, rounded to 40.9
Worked arithmetic, 2020: (0.20 × 30.2) + (0.25 × 50.0) + (0.20 × 81.3) + (0.35 × 14.2) = 6.04 + 12.50 + 16.26 + 4.97 = 39.77, rounded to 39.8
The Engagement score is an Axis-calculated ratio, not a published figure: 15.1 ÷ 30.2 = 50.0% for 2020 and 18.5 ÷ 41.1 = 45.0% for 2024, using the daily-use and overall-use percentages that Pedroso and colleagues report against the same denominator of all US adults. The 2020 result of exactly 50.0% is a useful internal check — it reproduces the JAMA Network Open companion paper’s description that approximately half of users report daily utilization.
What the 2024 reading says. Four years of extraordinary hardware growth moved the composite by 1.1 points. Adoption climbed 10.9 percentage points, a 36.1% relative increase, and two of the other three stages moved backwards. This is the single most important structural fact in connected health right now, and it is invisible to anyone measuring shipments.
What would move it. Clinical Transfer is the lever. Because it carries the 0.35 weight, every 10-point gain in the share of users who actually transmit data lifts the composite by 3.5 points — more than doubling adoption would. A reading above 50 requires Clinical Transfer to roughly double from its 2024 level; on the 2020–2024 trajectory of +5.0 points per four-year cycle, that arrives in the late 2030s absent a change in reimbursement or workflow.
What the index does not capture. CHLMI™ scores the consumer-to-clinician path only. It excludes prescribed remote patient monitoring programs, where the device is issued and the data pathway is built in by design — that market is measured separately below. It also treats “shared with a clinician” as a binary, when the clinical value of a shared record varies enormously by data type and condition. HINTS is self-reported, and the wearable question does not distinguish device categories.
CHLMI™ is an original metric of Axis Intelligence Research, published under CC BY 4.0. Cite: Axis Intelligence Research (2026). Connected Health Last-Mile Index. https://axis-intelligence.com/connected-health-statistics/
How Many People Use Connected Health Devices in 2026?
The honest answer is that two credible surveys give two different numbers, and the difference is methodological rather than contradictory.
The federal number comes from the Health Information National Trends Survey, the National Cancer Institute’s nationally representative instrument. Its 2024 cycle collected complete data from 7,278 respondents. Analyzed by the Yale team, it puts wearable use for health management at 41.1% of US adults — roughly 108 million people against a survey-weighted base of 262 million adults.
The consumer-research number comes from Rock Health’s 2025 Consumer Adoption of Digital Health Survey, fielded December 1–23, 2025 among 8,000 Census-matched US adults. It reports 57% owning at least one wearable or connected health device and 46% owning a wearable specifically.
The gap is definitional. HINTS asks about using a wearable to track health; Rock Health asks about ownership, and its 57% figure includes connected blood pressure cuffs, smart scales and continuous glucose monitors, which HINTS’s wearable question does not cover. The two are measuring adjacent populations with different verbs. Axis Intelligence Research treats HINTS as the utilization series and Rock Health as the ownership series, and does not average them — the methodologies are not compatible, and a blended figure would describe nothing that exists.
Connected health adoption — US and EU, headline series
| Metric | Value | Population | Period | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wearable use for health management | 41.1% | US adults | 2024 | HINTS / Pedroso et al. 2026 |
| Wearable use for health management | 30.2% | US adults | 2020 | HINTS / Pedroso et al. 2026 |
| Estimated wearable users | 108 million | US adults | 2024 | HINTS / Pedroso et al. 2026 |
| Own ≥1 wearable or connected device | 57% | US adults | Dec 2025 | Rock Health 2025 Consumer Adoption Survey |
| Own a wearable specifically | 46% | US adults | Dec 2025 | Rock Health 2025 Consumer Adoption Survey |
| Own a wearable specifically | 13% | US adults | 2015 | Rock Health 2025 Consumer Adoption Survey |
| Used internet-connected wearables | 30% | EU, aged 16–74 | 2024 | Eurostat (isoc_iiot_use) |
| Used internet-connected health devices | 8% | EU, aged 16–74 | 2024 | Eurostat (isoc_iiot_use) |
| Used any internet-connected device | 70% | EU, aged 16–74 | 2024 | Eurostat (isoc_iiot_use) |
A separate 2026 analysis in the Journal of the American College of Surgeons, drawing on the same HINTS series, put 2024 wearable users at approximately 107 million and reported that roughly 74 million used their devices routinely and 78 million were willing to share data with a healthcare provider. It also broke adoption out by condition: an estimated 37 million wearable users with obesity, 31 million with depression or anxiety, 30 million with hypertension, 17 million with diabetes, 12 million with lung or airway disease, 8 million with cancer and 7 million with a history of heart disease.
Jennifer Miller, Digital Health: The condition-level breakout is where this dataset earns its keep. Thirty million wearable users with hypertension is a larger monitored population than any hypertension trial ever assembled, and it is generating blood pressure and heart rate data continuously, for free, outside the clinic. The reason that has not changed hypertension outcomes at population scale is not sensor accuracy. It is that almost none of that data has a route into a chart, a care plan, or a reimbursable review. The bottleneck was never the wrist.
Why Doesn’t Wearable Data Reach Doctors?
This is the question the whole category turns on, and the HINTS series answers it with unusual clarity because it asks about willingness and behavior separately.
In 2024, 73.4% of wearable users said they were willing to share their data with a healthcare provider. 19.2% had done so. That is a 54.2 percentage point gap between stated intent and observed action. In 2020 the same gap was 67.1 points — 81.3% willing against 14.2% sharing.
Axis Intelligence Research calculates the intent-to-transfer conversion rate — actual sharing as a share of stated willingness — at 26.2% in 2024 (19.2 ÷ 73.4), up from 17.5% in 2020 (14.2 ÷ 81.3). So the pathway is widening. It is simply still narrow: roughly one in four people who want to hand their clinician a year of continuous data manages to do it.
There is a second signal buried in those numbers that deserves attention. Willingness fell — from 81.3% to 73.4%, a 7.9 point decline over four years in which the devices got better and the data got richer. Rising adoption normally recruits more permissive users, not fewer. A plausible reading is that as wearable data became more comprehensive and more obviously identifying, some share of users grew more protective of it, not less. Eurostat’s non-user data points the same direction from a different angle: among EU residents who had never used an internet-connected device, privacy concerns were cited by 8% and security concerns by 7%, both well behind the 41% who simply said they did not need one.
The intent-to-action gap in connected health
| Measure | 2020 | 2024 | Change | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Users willing to share data with clinicians | 81.3% | 73.4% | −7.9 pp | HINTS / Pedroso et al. 2026 |
| Users who actually shared data with clinicians | 14.2% | 19.2% | +5.0 pp | HINTS / Pedroso et al. 2026 |
| Intent-to-transfer gap | 67.1 pp | 54.2 pp | −12.9 pp | Axis Intelligence Research |
| Intent-to-transfer conversion rate | 17.5% | 26.2% | +8.7 pp | Axis Intelligence Research |
| Share of all US adults transferring data | 4.29% | 7.89% | +3.60 pp | Axis Intelligence Research |
The last row is the number Axis Intelligence Research would put in front of a health system board. Multiply adoption by transfer — 41.1% × 19.2% — and 7.89% of the entire US adult population moved wearable health data to a clinician in 2024. That is the true size of the consumer-to-clinical data channel, and it is an order of magnitude smaller than the ownership figures the category markets itself on.
Talking about data is not transferring data
Rock Health’s December 2025 survey found that 59% of wearable owners have discussed their wearable data with a healthcare provider — 30% regularly and 29% at least once — with a further 20% saying they want to but have not.
That 59% sits alongside HINTS’s 19.2%, and the two are not in conflict. Discussing a reading is not transferring a record. A patient who says “my watch flagged an irregular rhythm last month” has had a conversation; a patient whose device data lands in the chart has created a clinical artifact that can be trended, audited and acted on. Axis Intelligence Research publishes these two figures side by side rather than reconciling them, because the distance between them is the finding: connected health has already changed the consultation, and has barely touched the record.
Rock Health’s own reporting identifies the mechanism. Many health systems have not enabled Apple HealthKit or Google Health integrations inside their patient portals; the liability question around a missed alert has kept providers cautious; and there is no clear reimbursement pathway for asynchronous review of patient-generated data.
Jennifer Miller, Digital Health: Clinicians are not refusing this data out of technophobia. They are refusing unpaid, unbounded liability. A continuous feed with no review protocol, no reimbursement code and no defensible standard for what counts as an actionable alert is a malpractice exposure that arrives by the megabyte. Fix the reimbursement pathway for asynchronous review and the transfer number moves before any new sensor ships.
How Big Is Remote Patient Monitoring in Medicare?
Where the data pathway is designed rather than improvised, the picture inverts. Remote patient monitoring is the reimbursed, prescribed half of connected health: a clinician issues a connected device, the data transmits automatically, and the review is billable.
The HHS Office of Inspector General reported in August 2025 that nearly 1 million Medicare enrollees received remote patient monitoring in 2024, with Medicare payments for the service exceeding $500 million. The finding is drawn from OIG analysis of Medicare claims and Medicare Advantage encounter data.
The same evaluation is a program-integrity document, not a promotional one, and its concerns are worth stating plainly: OIG built monitoring measures around practices billing for a high proportion of enrollees with no prior relationship to the practice, and practices billing for multiple monitoring devices per enrollee per month. Rapid growth in a service category invites both legitimate expansion and billing that warrants scrutiny.
Remote patient monitoring in Medicare
| Metric | Value | Period | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Medicare enrollees receiving RPM | ~1,000,000 | 2024 | HHS OIG, OEI-02-23-00261 |
| Medicare RPM payments | >$500 million | 2024 | HHS OIG, OEI-02-23-00261 |
| Report issue date | August 25, 2025 | — | HHS OIG, OEI-02-23-00261 |
Set that against the consumer channel and the asymmetry is the story. Roughly a million people are in reimbursed monitoring programs where the data reaches a clinician by design. Something on the order of 20 million wearable users transferred data to a clinician on their own initiative. The reimbursed channel is far smaller but converts essentially all of its data; the consumer channel is vastly larger and converts under a fifth of it.
Are Health Apps and Patient Portals Closing the Gap?
Partly — and the federal data here is the most complete series in the entire category.
The Office of the Assistant Secretary for Technology Policy publishes the definitive US measurement in its data brief on patient portal and smartphone health app access, drawn from the same HINTS 7 cycle. In 2024, more than three in four individuals were offered online access to their medical records, and 65% were both offered and accessed their portal at least once in the past year — up from 25% in 2014, a 40 percentage point gain across a decade.
App-based access is now the majority route. 57% of portal users reached their records through an app in 2024, up from 51% in 2022 and 38% in 2020, while web-only access fell from 60% to 42% over the same period.
Two findings in that brief matter more than the headline adoption numbers.
Clinician encouragement is the strongest lever in the dataset. 89% of individuals offered portal access reported being encouraged by their provider to use it. Among those encouraged, 87% accessed the portal at least once in the past year, against 57% of those not encouraged. The pattern held for depth of use too: 92% versus 78% for viewing test results, and 82% versus 57% for reading clinical notes. A 30 point swing in access from a prompt at the end of a visit is a larger effect than any interface redesign has produced.
Fragmentation is getting worse, not better. 59% of individuals had multiple online medical records or portals in 2024, up from 50% in 2022. Only 7% used a portal-organizing app such as Apple Health Records to consolidate them — up from 2% in 2022, but still leaving consolidation running 8.43 times behind fragmentation.
US patient portal and health app access, 2014–2024
| Metric | 2014 | 2020 | 2022 | 2024 | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Offered online access to medical records | 42% | 59% | 73% | 77% | ASTP/ONC Data Brief 77 (HINTS) |
| Offered and accessed portal | 25% | 38% | 57% | 65% | ASTP/ONC Data Brief 77 (HINTS) |
| Proxy or caregiver access | — | 24% | 46% | 51% | ASTP/ONC Data Brief 77 (HINTS) |
| Accessed records via app | — | 38% | 51% | 57% | ASTP/ONC Data Brief 77 (HINTS) |
| Web-only access | — | 60% | 48% | 42% | ASTP/ONC Data Brief 77 (HINTS) |
| Had multiple portals | — | — | 50% | 59% | ASTP/ONC Data Brief 77 (HINTS) |
| Used a portal-organizing app | — | — | 2% | 7% | ASTP/ONC Data Brief 77 (HINTS) |
Access is also higher where clinical need is higher: 81% of individuals with a chronic condition were offered access and 69% accessed their records, rising to 86% and 76% among those managing a cancer diagnosis in the past five years. Proxy and caregiver access more than doubled between 2020 and 2024, from 24% to 51% — an underreported shift, given that caregivers are frequently the people actually operating a connected health setup for an older adult.
Who Is Being Left Out of Connected Health?
Adoption is not distributed the way clinical need is, and the Rock Health data states the problem in one line: device owners are more likely to describe their health as excellent (23%), while non-owners are more likely to report moderate, poor or very poor health.
The populations that would benefit most from continuous passive monitoring are the least likely to own the hardware. Across all device types, self-purchase is the dominant acquisition channel, which structurally selects for people who can pay and who are already well enough to be optimizing rather than managing.
Some of the demographic detail cuts against expectations. Women own wearables or connected devices at 58%, statistically alongside men at 57%. Device ownership is higher among racial and ethnic minority respondents (64%) than among white respondents (54%) — a pattern that should retire the assumption that consumer health hardware is uniformly a white, affluent product category.
The reimbursed side shows the same reversal. Between 2018 and 2022, remote physiologic monitoring claims in Medicare grew fastest among Black and Hispanic patients, and after adjustment for age, sex and clinical factors, Black and Hispanic Medicare patients had 88% and 84% higher RPM use rates respectively than white patients in 2022, per Health Affairs research published in August 2025. Where a clinician issues the device and a payer covers it, the equity picture is materially different from the self-purchase market.
Age is the sharper divide, and Eurostat quantifies it cleanly: 84% of EU residents aged 16 to 24 used at least one internet-connected device in 2024 against 45% of those aged 65 to 74. Wearable use ran at 40% among 16–24s. But the highest use of internet-connected health-monitoring devices was among 35–44 year olds, at 10% — not the oldest cohort, who have the most chronic disease.
Connected health adoption by segment
| Segment | Metric | Value | Period | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Women, US | Own wearable/connected device | 58% | Dec 2025 | Rock Health 2025 Survey |
| Men, US | Own wearable/connected device | 57% | Dec 2025 | Rock Health 2025 Survey |
| Racial/ethnic minority, US | Own wearable/connected device | 64% | Dec 2025 | Rock Health 2025 Survey |
| White, US | Own wearable/connected device | 54% | Dec 2025 | Rock Health 2025 Survey |
| Device owners, US | Self-report excellent health | 23% | Dec 2025 | Rock Health 2025 Survey |
| EU aged 16–24 | Any internet-connected device | 84% | 2024 | Eurostat (isoc_iiot_use) |
| EU aged 65–74 | Any internet-connected device | 45% | 2024 | Eurostat (isoc_iiot_use) |
| EU aged 16–24 | Internet-connected wearables | 40% | 2024 | Eurostat (isoc_iiot_use) |
| EU aged 35–44 | Internet-connected health devices | 10% | 2024 | Eurostat (isoc_iiot_use) |
Jennifer Miller, Digital Health: The Rock Health health-status finding is the one that should slow everybody down. A monitoring technology whose owners skew toward excellent self-rated health is generating a training corpus for exactly the population that needs it least. Every algorithm built on this data inherits that selection, and the inheritance compounds silently — models validated on the well, deployed on the sick.
How Engaged Are Connected Health Users?
Retention in this category is genuinely unusual, and it deserves saying without hedging: no other digital health format holds users like this.
Rock Health found 83% of wearable owners wear their device five or more days per week, including 59% who wear it always or nearly always. 47% have used a wearable for three or more years. 48% are still using the device they started with and a further 27% upgraded within the same brand, leaving only 23% who have switched brands outright.
Average ownership sits between one and two devices per user (1.5), with 22% of device owners holding two — most commonly a watch paired with a smart scale, a blood pressure cuff or a smart ring. Tracked metrics concentrate on physical activity (35% of wearable owners), sleep (26%) and heart rate (21%).
Set that against the HINTS daily-use series and a tension appears. Rock Health’s wear-frequency numbers are high; HINTS’s daily-use share of users fell from 50.0% to 45.0%. These questions differ — wearing a device is not the same as using it for health management, which is what HINTS asks — but the direction of the HINTS series is the one that matters for the CHLMI™, because a device worn passively without health-management intent produces a signal nobody is reading.
Wearable engagement and retention
| Metric | Value | Period | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wear device 5+ days per week | 83% | Dec 2025 | Rock Health 2025 Survey |
| Wear always or nearly always | 59% | Dec 2025 | Rock Health 2025 Survey |
| Used a wearable 3+ years | 47% | Dec 2025 | Rock Health 2025 Survey |
| Still using first wearable | 48% | Dec 2025 | Rock Health 2025 Survey |
| Upgraded within same brand | 27% | Dec 2025 | Rock Health 2025 Survey |
| Switched brands | 23% | Dec 2025 | Rock Health 2025 Survey |
| Average devices per owner | 1.5 | Dec 2025 | Rock Health 2025 Survey |
| Own two devices | 22% | Dec 2025 | Rock Health 2025 Survey |
| Track physical activity | 35% | Dec 2025 | Rock Health 2025 Survey |
| Track sleep | 26% | Dec 2025 | Rock Health 2025 Survey |
| Track heart rate | 21% | Dec 2025 | Rock Health 2025 Survey |
| Daily use as share of users | 45.0% | 2024 | Axis calculation on HINTS |
| Daily use as share of users | 50.0% | 2020 | Axis calculation on HINTS |
Which Connected Health Devices Are FDA-Cleared?
The regulatory boundary between consumer wellness hardware and regulated medical device is where the next phase of this market gets decided, and the FDA’s AI-Enabled Medical Device List is the place to watch it move.
The list is maintained by the FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health and was last updated September 4, 2026, covering marketing authorizations through late June 2026. One caveat belongs up front, and it comes from the agency itself: the FDA states plainly that the list is not a comprehensive resource of AI-enabled medical devices. Devices are identified primarily by AI-related terminology appearing in marketing authorization summaries and classification codes, so devices whose public summaries omit that language can be undercounted. Any total drawn from this list is a floor, not a census — which is why Axis Intelligence Research cites specific authorizations rather than a headline count.
Recent clearances show consumer-adjacent and home-monitoring hardware moving through the regulated pathway:
| Decision date | Submission | Device | Company | Panel |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-06-02 | K252844 | Tyto Insights for Wheeze Detection | Tyto Care Ltd. | Anesthesiology |
| 2026-05-29 | K252859 | ZEUS Platform | iRhythm Technologies | Cardiovascular |
| 2026-04-27 | K252628 | CASSIE | Wesper, Inc. | Anesthesiology |
| 2026-02-06 | K243348 | Athelas Home | Athelas, Inc. | Hematology |
| 2026-01-23 | K243349 | BodyGuardian Remote Monitoring System | Boston Scientific Cardiac Diagnostic Technologies | Cardiovascular |
| 2026-02-02 | K251200 | Vital Signs | Oxehealth Limited | Cardiovascular |
Source: FDA AI-Enabled Medical Device List, retrieved September 8, 2026.
The FDA has also signalled that it will explore methods to identify and tag devices incorporating foundation models, including large language models, in a future update of the list — and encourages sponsors to include that information in public summaries. That is a meaningful forward indicator for anyone tracking where AI-enabled connected health is heading.
Methodology
Data collection. Axis Intelligence Research assembled this dataset in September 2026 using a two-pass research and writing process. In the research pass, every source was fetched and read in full before any prose was written; each quantitative claim was recorded in a fact table with organization, document, URL, retrieval date and as-of date. The writing pass drew exclusively from that fact table. A separate adversarial verification pass matched every numeric token in the prose against a CSV row and re-ran every calculation.
Sources. Seven primary sources, three of them US federal:
- ASTP/ONC Health IT Data Brief No. 77, Individuals’ Access and Use of Patient Portals and Smartphone Health Apps, 2024 (Richwine C., July 2025), based on HINTS 7, n=7,278, fielded March–September 2024, response rate 27.31%. https://healthit.gov/data/data-briefs/individuals-access-and-use-patient-portals-and-smartphone-health-apps-2024/
- HHS Office of Inspector General, Billing for Remote Patient Monitoring in Medicare, OEI-02-23-00261, issued August 25, 2025. https://oig.hhs.gov/reports/all/2025/billing-for-remote-patient-monitoring/
- US Food and Drug Administration, AI-Enabled Medical Device List, Center for Devices and Radiological Health, updated September 4, 2026. https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/software-medical-device-samd/artificial-intelligence-enabled-medical-devices
- Eurostat, Use of Internet of Things by individuals, online data code isoc_iiot_use, 2024 reference year, data extracted July 2025. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Use_of_Internet_of_Things_by_individuals
- Pedroso AF, Dhingra LS, Aminorroaya A, Khera R. National trends in the use of wearables for health management and sharing of data with clinicians in the United States, 2020–2024. European Heart Journal – Digital Health, 7(Suppl_1), ztaf143.157, January 12, 2026. https://academic.oup.com/ehjdh/article/7/Supplement_1/ztaf143.157/8423024
- Rock Health, 2025 Consumer Adoption of Digital Health Survey, wearables and connected devices analysis, published June 1, 2026; n=8,000 Census-matched US adults, fielded December 1–23, 2025.
- Haridas C, Potter AL, Srinivasan D, et al. Increasing Use of Wearable Devices for Health or Activity Tracking Among Adults with Chronic Diseases in the US. Journal of the American College of Surgeons, 242(6):1580–1590, June 2026. DOI: 10.1097/XCS.0000000000001746
Supporting: Pedroso AF et al., Wearable Devices and Data Sharing in the US, JAMA Network Open 2026;9(6):e2617733 (companion publication of source 5); and Health Affairs 44(8):1005–1010, August 2025, on RPM use by race and ethnicity.
Arithmetic verification. Every Axis-calculated figure was computed twice — once in floating-point and once in exact rational arithmetic using Python’s fractions.Fraction — and both results agreed to nine decimal places before the figure entered prose. All formulas appear inline at the point of use.
Figures we chose not to publish. Global connected health market-size estimates were excluded. The available figures come from commercial research firms whose scope definitions differ by tens of billions of dollars, and Axis Intelligence Research does not publish a market total it cannot trace to a disclosed methodology. Where a number could not be verified against a fetched primary source, it does not appear on this page.
Scope of the analysis. HINTS is self-reported and does not distinguish device categories within its wearable question. Rock Health’s survey is Census-matched but non-probability. The two US series are reported separately throughout rather than combined. Eurostat’s ICT survey covers ages 16–74 while the US series cover adults 18 and over, so the transatlantic comparison is indicative of direction rather than an exact like-for-like. RPM figures cover Medicare only; Medicaid and commercial RPM are outside the OIG evaluation’s scope.
About This Dataset
Title: Axis Intelligence Connected Health Statistics 2026 Dataset
Publisher: Axis Intelligence Research Authors: Axis Intelligence Research and Jennifer Miller (Digital Health)
License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
Coverage: United States and European Union; 2014–2026; primary sources only
Proprietary metric: Connected Health Last-Mile Index (CHLMI™)
Data inquiries: [email protected]
Every number in this article exists as a row in the CSV, with value, unit, as-of date, geography, segment, source organization, source document, source URL, retrieval date, primary-source flag, Axis-calculated flag, method note and licence.
Cite this research
APA: Axis Intelligence Research, & Miller, J. (2026, September 8). Connected health statistics 2026: Devices, apps, remote monitoring and the clinical data gap. Axis Intelligence. https://axis-intelligence.com/connected-health-statistics/
MLA: Axis Intelligence Research and Jennifer Miller. “Connected Health Statistics 2026: Devices, Apps, Remote Monitoring and the Clinical Data Gap.” Axis Intelligence, 8 Sept. 2026, axis-intelligence.com/connected-health-statistics/.
Chicago: Axis Intelligence Research and Jennifer Miller. “Connected Health Statistics 2026.” Axis Intelligence, September 8, 2026. https://axis-intelligence.com/connected-health-statistics/.
BibTeX:
@article{axis2026connectedhealth,
title={Connected Health Statistics 2026: Devices, Apps, Remote Monitoring and the Clinical Data Gap},
author={{Axis Intelligence Research} and Miller, Jennifer},
journal={Axis Intelligence},
year={2026},
month={September},
day={8},
url={https://axis-intelligence.com/connected-health-statistics/}
}
Frequently Asked Questions
What percentage of Americans use connected health devices in 2026?
41.1% of US adults used a wearable device for health management in 2024, the most recent nationally representative federal measurement, per HINTS data analyzed by Pedroso and colleagues — an estimated 108 million people. A broader ownership measure from Rock Health’s December 2025 survey puts 57% of US adults owning at least one wearable or connected health device, including blood pressure cuffs, smart scales and continuous glucose monitors. The two figures measure different things: HINTS measures use for health management, Rock Health measures ownership across a wider device set.
How many wearable users actually share their data with a doctor?
19.2% of US wearable users had shared their data with a clinician as of 2024, against 73.4% who said they were willing to. Axis Intelligence Research calculates that this puts the intent-to-transfer conversion rate at 26.2%, and means 7.89% of all US adults transferred wearable health data to a clinician in 2024. Rock Health separately found 59% of wearable owners have discussed their data with a provider — discussing a reading and transferring a record are different acts, and the gap between the two figures is the gap between a conversation and a clinical artifact.
Why won’t my doctor look at my Apple Watch or Oura data?
Three structural reasons, none of them about your device. Many health systems have not enabled Apple HealthKit or Google Health integrations inside their patient portals. There is no clear reimbursement pathway for asynchronous review of patient-generated data, so the review is unpaid work. And clinicians face an unresolved liability question about what happens if a flagged alert is missed in a continuous feed. Reimbursement and workflow, not sensor quality, are the binding constraints.
How many Medicare patients are on remote patient monitoring?
Nearly 1 million Medicare enrollees received remote patient monitoring in 2024, with Medicare payments exceeding $500 million, according to the HHS Office of Inspector General’s August 2025 evaluation. That evaluation is a program-integrity review: OIG developed billing measures to flag practices billing for a high proportion of enrollees with no prior relationship to the practice, and practices billing for multiple monitoring devices per enrollee per month.
Is connected health adoption higher in the US or Europe?
The US leads by 11.1 percentage points on wearables — 41.1% of US adults in 2024 versus 30% of EU residents aged 16 to 74 in the same year. Within the EU, internet-connected health devices specifically reach only 8% of the population, 3.75 times below general wearable use, while 70% use at least one internet-connected device of any kind. The comparison is indicative rather than exact: Eurostat covers ages 16–74 and the US series cover adults 18 and over.
Do patients use apps or websites to reach their medical records?
Apps are now the majority route. 57% of US portal users accessed their online medical records through an app in 2024, up from 51% in 2022 and 38% in 2020, while web-only access fell from 60% to 42%, per ASTP/ONC Data Brief 77. Overall, 65% of individuals were both offered and accessed their portal at least once in the past year, up from 25% in 2014.
Does it matter if my doctor tells me to use the patient portal?
It is the single strongest lever in the federal dataset. 87% of individuals whose provider encouraged portal use accessed it at least once in the past year, against 57% of those not encouraged — a 30 point difference. The effect held for depth of use too: 92% versus 78% for viewing test results, and 82% versus 57% for reading clinical notes. 89% of people offered portal access reported receiving that encouragement.
Are people with chronic conditions using wearables?
Yes, in large numbers. Analysis of the 2024 HINTS cycle published in the Journal of the American College of Surgeons estimated 37 million US wearable users with obesity, 31 million with depression or anxiety, 30 million with hypertension, 17 million with diabetes, 12 million with lung or airway disease, 8 million with cancer and 7 million with a history of heart disease. The tension is that Rock Health found device owners are more likely to report excellent health (23%) while non-owners skew toward moderate, poor or very poor health — so the aggregate chronic-condition numbers coexist with a selection effect toward the already-well.
What is the Connected Health Last-Mile Index?
The Connected Health Last-Mile Index (CHLMI™) is an original Axis Intelligence Research metric scoring the full path a consumer health signal travels to become clinically useful: adoption, engagement, intent to share, and actual clinical transfer. It weights Clinical Transfer most heavily at 0.35, then Engagement at 0.25, Adoption at 0.20 and Intent at 0.20. The index read 40.9 in 2024, up just 1.1 points from 39.8 in 2020 — a period in which device adoption rose 10.9 percentage points. Full formula, inputs and dataset are published under CC BY 4.0.
Are consumer wearables becoming regulated medical devices?
The boundary is moving. The FDA’s AI-Enabled Medical Device List, updated September 4, 2026, shows home and consumer-adjacent monitoring hardware clearing the regulated pathway through 2026 — including Tyto Care’s wheeze detection feature (June 2026), iRhythm’s ZEUS Platform (May 2026), Wesper’s CASSIE (April 2026) and Boston Scientific’s BodyGuardian Remote Monitoring System (January 2026). The FDA cautions that the list is not comprehensive, since devices are identified by AI-related terminology in their authorization summaries rather than by a formal designation.