This is Optimizer, a weekly newsletter sent every Friday from Verge senior reviewer Victoria Song that dissects and discusses the latest phones, smartwatches, apps, and other gizmos that swear they’re going to change your life. Optimizer arrives in our subscribers’ inboxes at 10AM ET. Opt in for Optimizer here.
At CES 2026 this week, people kept asking me what health tech I was seeing on the show floor. My only answer was this: bodily fluids. As in urine, blood, sweat, and saliva.
With most people, my response typically got a handful of groans and raised eyebrows. Among insiders, I surprised no one.
CES is ground zero of the wellness Wild West. At Eureka Park and the Venetian Expo, you’ll find dozens of digital health startups hawking everything from smartwatches and smart rings to smart pillows. This isn’t new, per se. Urine tech in particular has always been a staple at the show, but what’s notable this year isn’t simply the presence of this tech — it’s the idea that mining these fluids can help you live longer and healthier.
Here’s some of what I saw: at-home hormone testing kits using urine and saliva; smart menstrual pads and panty liners; an in-toilet hydration tracker; a mirror that analyzes your facial blood flow to estimate how well you’re aging; a sperm microscope; and a smart scale that analyzes metabolic health through foot sweat.
It’s not just tiny startups, either. Bigger names in the space are also opening their platforms to accommodate data sources beyond heart rate. At the show, Withings announced it was partnering with Abbott to integrate the latter’s continuous glucose monitors (CGMs). Oura has a similar partnership with Dexcom that was announced in 2025. Whoop also added the ability to get blood panel data integrated into its app last year, followed soon by Oura, and now Ultrahuman is doing the same.
At the core, this fixation on bodily fluids is evidence that the entire industry is doubling down on metabolic health as the next frontier. Where digital health started with cardiovascular health, the next phase hinges on your metabolism. So after logging tens of thousands of steps on the show floor, I sat down with Oura CEO Tom Hale and Dexcom CEO Jake Leach to talk about where metabolic tech is going, the challenges ahead, and what we’re likely to see as consumers.
Both said the real balancing act is between finding useful data from additional metrics and the potential to overwhelm people with health anxiety. While people may be fine with step and heart rate data, getting into deeper metabolic insights comes with much more sensitive data. Introducing more advanced detection features — like, say, high blood pressure or glucose alerts — raises the stakes.
“Actually, we don’t need more sensors. We need more sense,” says Hale, who views metabolic insights derived from blood or urine testing as more likely to be episodic than continuous. For Hale, the point is to combine occasional, use-case-driven data with longer-term baseline data.
“You’re trying to solve a certain problem. Maybe you’re going through a super stressful time, and you’re trying to manage your stress because you’re hypertensive. Okay, maybe a cortisol sweat test is really useful, but when you figure that out, are you going to continually measure your cortisol? Probably not.”
“Bringing the data together in one place is really helpful. Having it in disparate places on disparate devices is problematic, but you’ve got to have technology and software surface actual insights and not just, ‘Here’s all these blood markers and here’s where they should be,’” says Leach.
This is a tale as old as health tech — and one many companies are trying to solve with AI. Hence why you’re starting to see so many companies adding AI-powered nutrition tracking, chatbots, and insights into their apps. Dexcom added AI insights for its Stelo CGM. Oura has also done it. Meanwhile, at CES 2026, Garmin announced it was also adding AI nutrition logging to its app for subscribers.
On paper, it’s a trend that makes a ton of sense. The reality is that the AI just isn’t there yet. When I push Leach on that, he agrees.
“We’ve got to push past that, and that is where things are kind of stuck. A technology like CGMs that has such obvious outcomes is a great technology to be pioneering that,” Leach says, noting that there are direct correlations between the lifestyle changes a person makes and how they’re reflected in their glucose readings.
The other problem, however, is data privacy. Getting blood tests is invasive, and many people currently live in a state of heightened anxiety. It’s a tough time for health tech to ask for more data from its users.
Case in point, Oura — and by extension, Hale — received backlash earlier this summer when Oura was revealed to have a partnership with Palantir and the Defense Department. Users accused the company of selling and sharing user data, forcing Hale to come on social media to refute the accusation. In public statements on social media, Hale stated that Oura never sells or shares user data; the Palantir partnership in question referred to a separate enterprise program. When I press the issue, Hale reiterates this point, adding that users’ menstrual data in particular is off-limits.
Months later, Hale says “Palantir-gate” didn’t hurt the company much overall, but was a compelling experience. “We weren’t selling anybody’s data, but we learned just how afraid people are about that and how much of a third rail that is.”
Otherwise, both Leach and Hale pointed to nutrition, blood pressure, and wearable gadget ecosystems as likely trends in the space. Dexcom plans to add macro tracking and a redesigned app later this year. Meanwhile, Hale noted that we might soon start seeing greater integration between smart glasses and food tracking. For example, taking a photo of your meal, getting calorie estimates, and then cross-referencing all that data with your given tracker of choice. Hale also identified chronic condition management as another potential avenue wearables and health tech are starting to explore.
“The wearable space in general is experiencing quite the boom right now, and I think it’s driven by the actual desire of people to live healthier and for healthcare systems to improve their outcomes,” agrees Leach. “Wearable technology is the way we do this at scale, because not every doctor can see every patient all of the time.”
Taking all this in, I don’t think the average Joe is suddenly going to be installing pee collectors in their toilet, going for monthly blood draws, or stepping on $600 scales that tell you how long you’re going to live based on your foot sweat. That would truly be a dystopian 2026. But based on what I saw, and what I heard from Hale and Leach, I do think you’re going to start seeing a larger shift away from basic fitness and more toward this idea of promoting longevity through preventive measures. It’s going to be less about closing your rings every day and more about doing small lifestyle experiments over a few months and tracking any changes. Optimistically, those changes may help prevent or improve common ailments that build up over time, like diabetes, hypertension, or high cholesterol. Maybe those experiments will involve bodily fluids, maybe not. But clearly, the industry seems to think metabolism is the key to unlocking a healthier you.
Unfortunately, I think that means more bodily fluids.
