Does tracking your health data make you healthier?

Customers can get full body scans in less than an hour in private clinics like Prenuvo, here in the heart of New York. SWI swissin.ch / Aylin Elci

From monitoring sleep patterns to scanning your whole body, an increasing number of healthy individuals are privately tracking their physical data to stay in shape. But what are really the benefits? 

Influencer Kim Kardashian shocked fans this November when she revealed she had been diagnosed with a brain aneurysm that was spotted during a full-body scan at a private clinic. She first posted to her 354 million fans about these scans in August 2023, prompting some media outlets to call the practice the “latest wellness status symbol”.

Although there is no official data on the number of clinics providing entire body tests to seemingly healthy individuals, the offer is growing and has spread from North America to the rest of the world. In Switzerland, where private clinics, hospitals and luxury wellness centres have been offering preventive health treatments for decades, at least five different start-ups offering full-body scans have popped up in the last three years.

These clinics complement an array of recent preventive health practices at the intersection of wellness and longevity like wearables, small trackers fitted on everyday devices such as phones and watches to measure anything from stress to ageing. Thanks to their ubiquity and increasing affordability, these tools are now part of everyday life. But questions on their real benefits to health remain open and data remain scarce.

“In just two generations, our lifespans extended by 20-30 years, so people between the ages of 50 and 70 want to age healthily,” says Dr Francis Meier, a co-founder of the Swiss Center for Preventive Medicine at the Hôpital de la Tour campus in Geneva.

“You have to consider what is good for the patient, and not what is good for business, and those two things don’t always go together,” he says. “[Full-body scans] are a business set up from scratch to make money”.

Curious about why Switzerland is known for longevity?

According to the doctor, Switzerland has strong screening programmes for diseases that respond well to treatment like breast, lung, prostate and skin cancers, which is why his clinic does not provide full-body scans. Other anomalies found on scanners are either rare diseases with no known effective treatment, or won’t develop into illnesses. Both options can cause anxiety and unnecessary costs for the patient.

A billion-dollar industry

This has not stopped the market for health tracking from surging. Clinics, startups and tech giants are positioning themselves as preventive health companies. Their selling point is to catch diseases as early as possible through broad data collection – even if the client is healthy. 

Celebrity investors and top venture capital firms like a16z are investing in scanning centres like Function Health, which raised a total of $358 million (CHF285 million) in funding since it was set up in the United States in 2022. Its Swedish competitor Neko Health, founded a year later, raised $325 million. As of 2025, the companies were respectively valued at $2.5 billion and $1.8 billion. 

The wearables market is projected to more than double from $60.9 billion in 2024, to $162.7 billion in five years’ time, according to Grand view researchExternal link. The industry is also getting backing from policymakers. In July, the American Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr launched a campaign to encourage all Americans to use wearables, and the Apple Watch got approved as a medical grade tool to detect hypertension by the country’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in September.

From sleep data to blood sugar, devices can now track nearly everything:

Those interested in their health data now have a myriad of choice when it comes to brand, price, use and function, starting from step-counters worth a handful of dollars to smartwatches that cost upwards of $400. Full-body scans, on the other hand, come at a higher price as they require a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine, which collects a large amount of data to virtually reconstruct a person’s organs and tissues. 

Tests at Swiss start-up Aeon begin at CHF2,490 ($3126) for a full-body scan and blood test, and reach CHF6,990 for an additional bone density scan, a genetic analysis, an appointment with a longevity expert, and an AI body composition analysis. This is not reimbursed by Swiss health insurance.

Targeting the healthy 

Experts say the belief our individual behaviour can impact our health is one of the main reasons behind the surge. “Only 25% of our lifespan can really be explained through genetics, so there is this idea that if we take care of our behaviour, we could have a healthier life,” says Filipe Barata, senior researcher at the Center for Digital Health Interventions of the federal technology institute ETH Zurich. 

Both scanning and wearable companies entice clients with phrases like “health is beautiful” and “take control of your own health” that stress the importance of wellbeing. They target healthy individuals, whilst emphasising that their services don’t replace medical grade tests or screening.

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“[The offering is] designed for health-conscious adults who want to establish a comprehensive baseline of their health and better understand their personal risk profile,” says a representative for Swiss start-up Aeon. 

When Prenuvo, the company Kardashian used, first opened in Bethesda, Maryland, in the summer of 2024, it reached out to wellness influencers from the area like makeup artist Jeet Bahra. The 39-year-old accepted a free scan against a post on her social media accounts because she didn’t have health insurance and was concerned about breast cancer. 

Mammographies aren’t mandatory, reimbursed, or conducted before the age of 40 in many countries, including the US. “I’ve had at least a dozen friends who have gone from being fine one day and spotting a lump in their breast the next day that led to a mastectomy,” says Bahra, who got clean results back. Prenuvo didn’t reply to questions on their offer.

Data overload

Courtney McKay, a 31-year-old clinical psychology trainee, says she will “surely” get a full-body scan at some point. She has been relying on wearables for the last decade to keep herself healthy and active. McKay has a Whoop sensor bracelet, which she got from her boyfriend who upgraded his own model recently. The two regularly compare stats but stopped checking their sleep statistics first thing in the morning, so that ratings don’t “dictate their day”. 

“I’m trying to determine how I feel before looking at my data”, says McKay. Many users have been reporting feeling stressed after looking at their sleep data, a syndrome called orthosomnia and first documented in 2017 as the “perfectionistic quest for the ideal sleep in order to optimise daytime function”.

Lifespan vs health span

According to the Cambridge Dictionary, longevity is defined as “living for a long time”. The term is increasingly used to refer to lifespan (total years lived) and health span (years lived in good health, free from chronic disease and disability). 

McKay’s “healthspan” data, which includes the measure of her biological age against her chronological one, has also been on her mind. “I don’t know if it’s anxiety, but for example, I was on a hen weekend and I did think staying up late was going to impact my pace of ageing negatively. This is something I don’t think I like,” says McKay. The speed of ageing has become one of the most popular health data, and can be measured with various smart devices. Although she isn’t keen on exercising, McKay says her connected watch motivates her to go to workout regularly. 

But experts warn there is scant evidence that tracking personal health data translates into healthier lives. According to behaviour-change specialists, awareness of unhealthy habits leads to no change in behaviour in roughly half of cases. 

And when it does correlation is hard to prove. 

“Longevity research is a hard thing to do because it’s very difficult to really investigate causality, and most findings are correlational,” says Barata from ETH Zurich. 

Furthermore, many users don’t routinely share their wearable results with health professionals, especially when they are not actively seeking medical advice (like McKay and Bahra). When they do, these data often have important limitations in accuracy and validation because most consumer wearables are designed as wellness tools rather than medical devices.

“Having those devices is good I think, but what is still very hard is making clear-cut recommendations,” says Barata. “The data usually only support broad observations like ‘you would benefit from moving more’, rather than firm, diagnostic statements,” he says.

Find out more about overdiagnosis and why identifying a disease earlier doesn’t always improve mortality:

While full-body scans offer more precise data than that on a watch, they also call for caution. “I would absolutely counsel people against ever going for that type of health screening,” says Suzanne O’Sullivan, a consultant neurologist at the University College London. 

MRI scans came into regular clinical use in the 1990s, and incredibly clear images have only been available for the last decade, the neurologist explains. “We are in the very early stages of knowing what the insides of healthy people look like, and are only still learning about all our differences and the abnormalities people live with,” says O’Sullivan. 

Beyond being anxiety-inducing, results from scans can also lead to harmful or unnecessary treatments, according to the neurologist. “The more tests you do, the more irregularities you will find, until ultimately you’re at risk of having treatment that you definitely did not need because a doctor will always err on the side of treating rather than not treating”. 

Edited by Virginie Mangin/ds