Apple is actively building toward a health and fitness platform for its upcoming AI smart glasses, according to Mark Gurman’s Power On newsletter, though the company does not expect those features to be ready when the first-generation model ships in late 2027. The glasses are currently planned to be revealed publicly at WWDC27, giving Apple roughly a year to finalize the core product before health capabilities follow in a subsequent version.
The potential health implementation centers on a glasses-based version of the Workout Buddy feature already familiar from Apple Watch, paired with a heart-rate sensor embedded in the frame, similar to the sensor Apple debuted in AirPods Pro 3. Cameras on the glasses could allow the system to analyze workout form and give runners or other athletes real-time guidance, turning the glasses into something more useful during exercise than a wrist-worn device can be.
Apple’s seriousness about this direction shows up in its hiring activity. The Vision Products Group is currently recruiting for roles focused on defining “the future of health, well-being and fitness experiences across vision products” and on translating “ambiguous opportunities at the intersection of spatial computing, wearables, consumer health and human behavior” into product direction. Job listings at that level of specificity indicate foundational engineering work is underway, not a concept still being sketched out.
This is not Apple’s first attempt at health features on a face-worn device. The company previously developed a version of Fitness+ for Vision Pro that would have let users watch workout videos, track movement, and close their Activity rings inside the headset, with special body tracking analysis planned to differentiate it from watching the same content on an iPad or Apple TV. That effort was abandoned because the headset was too heavy to wear during exercise and the technological hurdles proved too significant to clear in any reasonable timeframe.
Glasses are a different proposition, they are designed for all-day wear, which is exactly what health monitoring requires, and the frame form factor places sensors close to the head without the bulk that made Vision Pro impractical for fitness use.
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.
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 wearable health device that neither Apple Watch nor AirPods can replicate.
