Apple Watch owns your wrist. AirPods Pro 3 now monitors your heart rate from your ear. The next move? Your face.
According to Bloomberg, Apple is exploring ways to turn its future smart glasses and Vision headsets into health and fitness companions. Their cameras and sensors could eventually track movement, analyse workouts, and help users improve how they exercise.
Apple is actively hiring for it right now, and the product roadmap makes the direction clear.
What Apple is Actually Planning
Apple’s Vision Products Group is looking for someone to define health and fitness experiences for the eyewear and headset division. That job listing, published August 2, 2026, alongside Bloomberg’s reporting from the same day, confirms that health is a deliberate and funded pillar of the glasses strategy, not an afterthought.
Apple previously explored bringing immersive Fitness+ experiences to the Vision Pro, using the headset’s body-tracking capabilities to analyse a user’s movements during workouts. Those plans never materialised because the headset proved too heavy for exercise and other technical hurdles prevented the feature from reaching consumers.
Smart glasses solve the weight problem entirely. A pair of acetate frames weighs a fraction of what Vision Pro does. You can actually wear them while running, lifting, or moving through a workout class.
Gurman believes smart glasses are ultimately a more practical platform for health and fitness experiences than a bulky headset.
What Health Features Are Being Considered in Apple Smart Glasses?
The glasses, planned for 2027, do not have an AR display, which rules out watching a fitness class through them. What remains are sensors, cameras, and voice output. The building blocks for this already exist across Apple’s product range.
Heart rate monitoring
The PPG sensor in the AirPods Pro 3 emits invisible infrared light 256 times per second, measures heart rate, and feeds data into up to 50 workout types in the Fitness app. Glasses sit close enough to the head to use the same principle. The temple arms of glasses rest against the skull and sit near major blood vessels, physically well-suited for optical heart rate sensing.
Workout and movement tracking
The cameras in the AI smart glasses could additionally record the execution of an exercise, precisely the function that failed in the headset due to its weight. A smart glasses with camera pointed at your body during a squat or a run could provide real-time form feedback that no wrist device can offer.
What this could look like in practice:
| Health Feature | How Glasses Enable It | Apple Watch Equivalent |
| Heart rate | PPG sensors in temple arms | Yes |
| Workout form analysis | Camera-based movement tracking | No |
| Calorie tracking | Heart rate + motion data | Yes |
| Spatial activity awareness | Camera + Apple Intelligence | No |
| Hands-free coaching | Siri voice output | Limited |
Why Glasses Beat the Wrist for Some Health Data
The wrist is good for steps, heart rate, and sleep. But it cannot see what you are doing.
A camera-equipped AI smart glasses changes that. It can observe posture during a workout, flag when your running form breaks down, or notice that you have been sitting still for too long, all passively, without you lifting a finger.
That is a fundamentally different category of health data than anything Apple Watch currently captures. It is the kind of ambient, continuous health awareness that Apple has been building toward for years, first with Watch, then with AirPods, now with glasses.
The global smart glasses market is projected to reach $18.5 billion by 2030, growing at a CAGR of 25.3%. Health features are expected to be a primary driver of that growth as consumers look for wearables that do more than tell the time or play music.
The Privacy Problem Apple Has to Solve First
One reason the glasses slipped from their originally expected late 2026 launch to late 2027 is Apple’s ongoing effort to resolve the privacy questions that have followed camera-equipped glasses since Meta’s Ray-Bans attracted bans and public opposition in several contexts.
Apple is currently exploring multiple approaches, including a software-constrained option where the full camera hardware would be present but restricted from capturing photos or video, with cameras used exclusively for visual inference fed into AI tools rather than for recording.
That constraint would address the most immediate public concerns but would also limit what health features are possible, since form analysis and movement tracking depend on the camera actually seeing the user and their environment in real time.
This is the central tension Apple has to resolve. The more the camera is restricted for privacy, the less it can do for health. Apple’s answer to that problem will define how capable the health features ultimately are at launch, and how quickly they can expand.
When Will Health Features in Apple Glasses Arrive?
Bloomberg does not expect health features to arrive on the first generation of Apple smart glasses, which could debut toward the end of 2027.
The honest timeline looks like this:
| Generation | Expected Launch | Health Features |
| Gen 1 (N50) | Late 2027 | AI assistant, cameras, Siri, no health sensors |
| Gen 2 | 2028–2029 | Heart rate, workout tracking, movement analysis |
| Gen 3+ | 2030+ | Full health platform, potential AR display |
The first AI smart glasses from Apple will be compelling for what they do with Siri and visual intelligence. The health story is being built in parallel, and it is the more significant long-term ambition.
Apple’s Health Wearable Arc Makes Sense
Apple Watch launched in 2015 with a focus on notifications and fitness basics. By 2022 it had ECG, blood oxygen monitoring, crash detection, and fall alerts. AirPods Pro 3 added heart rate tracking in 2024, something nobody expected from earbuds two years prior.
The pattern is clear. Apple enters a wearable category with core features, earns consumer trust, and layers in health capabilities once the hardware and regulatory groundwork is in place.
Health is clearly a second-act story for Apple’s glasses strategy. If Apple can resolve the camera privacy questions and get heart rate sensing working reliably in a frame people wear all day, it has a genuinely differentiated health device.
The wrist, the ear, and next, the face.
FAQs
Will Apple smart glasses have health tracking features?
Not in the first generation, which is expected in late 2027. Apple is actively developing health and fitness capabilities for future models, including heart rate monitoring and camera-based workout analysis. Bloomberg confirmed these plans on August 2, 2026.
How would Apple AI smart glasses track health?
Using PPG sensors in the temple arms for heart rate monitoring, the same technology in AirPods Pro 3, alongside cameras that can analyse movement and exercise form in real time. Apple Intelligence would process and interpret that data through Siri.
Are smart glasses with cameras better than Apple Watch for health?
For different things, yes. Apple Watch is better for continuous heart rate and sleep tracking. Smart glasses with cameras could offer something Watch cannot, visual analysis of movement, posture, and workout form. Together they would be more powerful than either device alone.
Why is Apple focusing on glasses for health after Apple Watch?
Apple Watch tracks what your wrist can sense. Glasses add a visual layer, cameras that see what you are doing, not just how fast your heart is beating. That unlocks a new category of health data, including exercise form analysis and ambient movement tracking.
When will Apple smart glasses health features be available?
Apple’s roadmap suggests health features will arrive in the second generation, expected around 2028 to 2029. The first generation launching in late 2027 will focus on AI assistance, Siri, and camera features rather than health sensors.
