The Impact of Wearable Technology on Healthcare by Dr David Owens

2026 is predicted to be the year artificial intelligence (AI) becomes fully embedded in healthcare delivery. At OT&P, we are actively integrating AI in ways that support our clinicians and, most importantly, improve patient care and outcomes.

Below are three major ways AI will transform healthcare in 2026, reshaping how doctors work, how consultations are delivered, and how patients can optimise healthspan and longevity.

AI Medical Assistants Empowering Doctors

AI assistants are transforming clinical practice by reducing administrative burden and enhancing real-time decision‑making. Acting as a true care partner, AI supports clinicians before, during, and after consultations.

These tools can transcribe consultations automatically and generate structured clinical notes, templates, referral letters, and medical reports with a single click. AI assistants can also query patient data to produce summaries, ICD‑10 codes, or draft treatment plans, dramatically reducing documentation time.

In addition, AI provides instant insights from investigations, medical history, and longitudinal patient records. Virtual patient check‑ins, prior authorisation support, and evidence‑based clinical recommendations are increasingly managed by AI, allowing doctors to spend more time with patients.

By streamlining workflows such as dictation, editing, mobile access, and task automation, AI assistants can reduce administrative workload by up to 70%, improve accuracy, and support complex clinical reasoning. This enables clinicians to focus on diagnosis, empathy, and better health outcomes.

How AI Is Reshaping the Medical Consultation Process

AI is redefining the traditional medical consultation model. Healthcare is shifting from a linear process:

History → examination → test → diagnosis → prescription — to a continuous, adaptive cycle focused on prediction, prevention, and personalisation.

Rather than a single episodic consultation, AI enables an ongoing loop that continually updates risk profiles and care plans. The new care sequence increasingly becomes:

Prediction → targeted history and examination → investigation → AI‑supported diagnosis → personalised therapy → continuous monitoring and adjustment

A key component of this transformation is continuous sensing. Wearables and home monitoring devices already stream data such as heart rate, rhythm, sleep, activity, glucose levels, and blood pressure into clinical platforms. AI analyses this data to detect early signs of deterioration, including arrhythmias or early heart failure decompensation.

AI also strongly supports the move away from one‑size‑fits‑all protocols towards individualised care plans, particularly for complex or high‑cost conditions. By integrating genetics, comorbidities, previous treatment responses, and lifestyle factors, AI helps clinicians select more precise therapeutic programmes, reducing errors and adverse effects.

While these plans remain doctor‑supervised, they are increasingly personalised rather than protocol‑driven.

AI, Healthspan and Longevity Gains

AI is opening new frontiers in healthspan and longevity medicine. For patients with access to advanced AI‑driven tools, the technology offers targeted strategies to extend healthspan, the years of healthy, functional life, while also supporting longevity.

AI can analyse multi‑omics data, including genomics and proteomics, to identify personalised biomarkers of biological age. This enables earlier interventions designed to slow or reverse aspects of biological ageing.

Predictive models using wearable data and clinical investigations can forecast age‑related risks such as cognitive decline or frailty. These insights guide tailored lifestyle, exercise, nutritional, and pharmacological interventions aimed at delaying multimorbidity and preserving vitality well into later decades.

By intelligently combining and “stacking” these interventions, AI has the potential to add years of high‑functioning life, not just years lived.