Wearable Technologies in Gastrointestinal Disorders: Current Evidence and Future Directions

Gastrointestinal disorders fluctuate between clinical encounters, creating a need for objective longitudinal monitoring. We review wearable technologies across gastrointestinal disorders, emphasizing clinical applications, current evidence, and barriers to implementation.

Wearables capture physiologic, biochemical, and acoustic signals relevant to gastrointestinal disease. In inflammatory bowel disease, wearable-derived physiologic changes may precede inflammatory and symptomatic flares and help distinguish inflammatory from non-inflammatory symptoms. Sweat biosensors can measure inflammatory analytes, including calprotectin. Beyond inflammatory bowel disease, autonomic measures characterize disorders of gut-brain interaction, electrogastrographic and acoustic devices assess gastrointestinal motility, and activity and sleep metrics may aid postoperative recovery assessment and risk stratification in chronic liver disease. Evidence remains predominantly observational, and validated clinical thresholds are lacking, limiting the current clinical applicability of wearable derived signals. Wearables enable continuous, noninvasive monitoring across gastrointestinal disorders, but prospective trials are needed to establish clinical utility, actionable thresholds, workflow integration, and patient-centered implementation, and demonstrate improvement in clinically meaningful outcomes.