Longevity & AgingSmartwatch Data and Routine Blood Tests Predict Insulin Resistance Before Diabetes Appears
Insulin resistance often develops years before type 2 diabetes, yet the tests that detect it are costly or rarely ordered. In the WEAR-ME study, 1,165 US adults wore Fitbit or Pixel devices and had routine blood work, with HOMA-IR as the reference measure. Models combining wearable data, demographics, fasting glucose and lipids identified insulin resistance (HOMA-IR >2.9) with an AUROC of 0.80, 76% sensitivity and 84% specificity. A wearable foundation model pretrained on 40 million hours of sensor data further improved results; in a small independent cohort (n=72), adding it raised AUROC from 0.76 to 0.88. The team also built an LLM agent that explains results, which endocrinologists preferred over a base LLM. Findings are promising but need larger, more diverse validation.
