Wearables: The Digital Witness Your Lawyer Needs to Know About

You were just in a car accident. 

Now, you’re in the hospital and your mind is in overdrive—how are you going to pay your medical bills? When can you return to work? How will you prove your damages to the insurance company? 

But, wait. One of the most ubiquitous sources of data and evidence is sitting right beside you. Your Apple Watch, Fitbit, Oura ring, smart glasses, or other wearable tech is quietly logging your every move. It’s storing data that might follow you into the courtroom—your every move, heart rate, sleep patterns, and activity levels. 

We don’t typically consider wearable technology in personal injury law, but it’s a significant factor in the process today. Devices worn by tens of millions of Americans create a continuous, timestamped digital record of our physical lives. That record can be enormously powerful for injured plaintiffs, but it can also be used against you in ways that most people never anticipate.

If you own a wearable device and you've been injured, you need to understand exactly what's at stake.

What data is your wearable device collecting?

Today’s wearable technology is as sophisticated as medical-grade instruments. Your Apple Watch can perform an electrocardiogram and detect signs of atrial fibrillation (AFib), and it can generate a single-lead ECG. That’s… wild. 

But while this can be very important, and maybe life-saving, information for certain people under some circumstances, it also raises questions about what your device already knows about you. 

Here’s what your device might already know about your physical condition:

• Steps taken per day, and changes in your walking speed or gait
• Heart rate, resting heart rate, and heart rate variability
• Sleep duration, sleep quality, and interruptions throughout the night
• Active calories burned and overall physical output
• Flights of stairs climbed, distance traveled, and workout data
• Blood oxygen levels and, in some models, electrocardiogram (ECG) readings
• Fall detection, including the time, date, and force of impact

These data are timestamped and stored—sometimes for years—in the cloud accounts associated with your devices. 

Because it is electronically stored information, it is legally discoverable in civil litigation. Opposing counsel and insurance companies can request access to it as evidence in your lawsuit.

History of wearable technology and the courts

The first known use of wearable technology data in personal injury litigation occurred in Canada in 2014. A law firm representing a young woman injured in an accident used her Fitbit activity data to show that, following her injury, her daily activity levels had fallen significantly below those of an average woman her age and profession. The data provided objective, quantifiable proof that her lifestyle had been meaningfully disrupted, which was far more persuasive than her testimony alone.

In the U.S., an early use of wearable tech data was in a criminal proceeding in Pennsylvania. In that case, a woman’s Fitbit data contradicted her claim that she was asleep when she was claimed to have been attacked. The device showed her awake and walking around during the night of the alleged incident. The prosecutors used the data to charge her with filing a false report.

In 2025, the Supreme Court of Connecticut ruled that a trial court did not abuse its discretion in finding Fitbit data “sufficiently reliable to be admissible scientific evidence.” The court credited expert testimony about the accuracy of the specific model and established a foundation that is likely to influence how courts across the country treat this evidence going forward.

Can the data from wearables give you an advantage?

It’s possible. Personal injury lawsuits typically rely heavily on subjective evidence, such as the victim’s own testimony about their pain, physical limitations, sleep disruptions, and changes to their quality of life. Insurance companies (defendants) then strategize to attack the victim’s credibility, and suggest that their descriptions of how the accident has affected their life isn’t as extreme as what they’ve said. But when a wearable has data that supports the testimony, it’s much more difficult for the insurance company to make this argument.

Wearables can document a pre-injury baseline

Wearable data can establish who you were before the injury. If you have months or years of data that shows you consistently walked 8,000 steps a day, slept seven hours each night, and maintained an active lifestyle—and then the data shows a dramatic decrease following the accident—you have objective, timestamped evidence of the actual physical toll of the injury. The contrast will be compelling to a jury in a way that testimony alone can’t replicate.

Proof of current limitations

If you’re having trouble sleeping because of chronic pain, your Apple Watch or Oura ring sleep data might show exactly that, which is otherwise hard to prove. If your mobility has been restricted since the accident, this will be reflected in your step count. If you’re unable to perform the physical activities you previously enjoyed, your watch’s workout history will indicate a sharp decline. 

Defense attorneys and insurance companies are trained to be skeptical of a plaintiff's self-reported symptoms. But objective data strips away that skepticism—they can’t argue very strongly when a wearable device shows sleep patterns and other activity patterns, with changes that exactly coincide with the injury.

Fall detection and documentation of other health incidents

Newer Apple Watch and Fitbit models include fall detection features that log the time, date, and force of impact if a fall is detected. This can even record slip-and-fall accidents, which are a common category of personal injury claims. 

Some newer wearable technology models include fall-detection features that log the time, date, and impact force when a significant fall is detected. In slip-and-fall cases, this data can be invaluable. It can corroborate exactly when and where you fell and the severity of the impact, providing objective evidence of the incident itself rather than just its aftermath.

Wearable technology to support emotional distress and psychological claims

Some wearable devices now measure physiological indicators of stress, like heart rate variability. Therefore, the potential continues to grow for using this data to support emotional distress and PTSD claims. Mental health injuries are notorious for being difficult to prove, understandably. But objective physiological data that reflects elevated stress responses over time might help bridge this evidentiary gap.

Can data from wearable technology hurt your case?

The same data that can help you can also hurt your case. Defense attorneys and insurance companies understand how wearables work as discovery tools and evidence. As a result, they’re now routinely requesting this data in personal injury claims. Some defense attorneys will request data on the plaintiff’s active energy, stand minutes, steps, walking and running distance, stair speed, flights climbed, exercise minutes, step length, walking speed and workouts. They’re essentially looking for a comprehensive profile of your physical life and well-being. 

So, how is this detrimental? 

Consider these scenarios:

• You claim your back injury has left you unable to engage in physical activity, but your Fitbit data shows that two weeks after the accident, you completed a five-mile hike.
• You claim severe and persistent sleep disruption due to pain, though your Apple Watch data shows you are sleeping a full eight hours most nights.
• You claim your injuries have dramatically reduced your quality of life and physical function; however, your step count data barely changed after the accident.

These can be true, even if you’re also being truthful about the extent of your injuries. Injuries are complicated, and someone recovering from an injury could have good days and bad days, physically. Activity data does not capture pain. You might have a high step count on a particular day, but that doesn’t mean that you didn’t experience pain with every step, or that you weren’t suffering. However, a defense attorney can’t separate the pain from the activity, and a jury might decide based on this information.

Should you delete the data from your wearable device?

No, deleting data isn’t the answer. 

Civil litigation includes a legal duty to preserve evidence once you know or should know that a lawsuit is possible.

If you deliberately destroy data that could be relevant to your case—which includes data from a wearable device—this could be considered “spoliation of evidence.” Spoliation is the intentional, reckless, or negligent withholding, hiding, altering, fabricating, or destroying of evidence relevant to a legal proceeding. The courts can impose severe sanctions for spoliation, including instructing the jury to assume the destroyed evidence was unfavorable to you. The cure, in other words, can be far worse than the disease.

Discovery, privacy, wearables and the law

Wearable device data qualifies as electronically stored information (ESI) under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. It can be requested during the discovery phase of litigation, which is the pre-trial process in which both sides exchange relevant evidence. Under the standard discovery rules, a party may obtain information about “any nonprivileged matter that is relevant to any party's claim or defense and proportional to the needs of the case.”

Relatively speaking, this is new technology. The courts are still working out the boundaries of when this data must be produced. One New York court in 2020 blocked a defense request  for a plaintiff’s Fitbit records because the request was based on speculation, rather than specific evidence that the data was relevant. The plaintiff had lost 50 pounds during the course of litigation, and the defense wanted to use his activity data to argue that he wasn’t as injured as he claimed—but the court found that many factors can cause weight loss, and it therefore denied the request. 

Still, courts across the country are increasingly willing to allow this type of discovery if there’s a reasonable basis for its relevance. Once a court orders production, the plaintiff must provide the full data.

Steps for protecting your lawsuit and your wearable technology data

If you’ve been injured and are considering a personal injury claim (or if you’ve already filed), take the following steps:

1. Immediately inform your attorney about your wearable devices. Your attorney needs to know what devices you own, what data they collect, and for how long the data was collected prior to the accident. This will shape your entire evidence strategy.
2. Do not delete or alter any data from your wearable devices. Again, if there’s a reasonable anticipation of litigation, you’re legally obligated to preserve all potentially relevant data. If you delete your data, it can result in sanctions, adverse jury instructions, or even a dismissal of the case. Continue wearing your device — or consider starting.
3. Consider purchasing a wearable device after an accident. If you don’t already use a wearable device, there could be value in starting after an injury to document your post-injury activity levels, sleep patterns, and physical limitations from the earliest possible data. The sooner you begin to document these aspects of your life, the more complete the record will be. However, this is a good question to ask your attorney before purchasing.
4. Know what the data actually shows. Your attorney should be the first to review your wearable data, before the opposing side has the opportunity to do so. This allows you to provide context, prepare for challenging questions, and frame the data accurately. A high step count on one day doesn’t negate an injury, but it might need to be explained in the context of your overall pattern, and you might need to add explanation of factors that your wearable technology doesn’t express.
5. Be consistent—both online and in real life. The same principles that apply to wearable data apply to social media. If you claim a debilitating back injury, but then you post on Instagram that you were at a concert, hiking, or jumping on a trampoline with your kids, you have a problem. Your digital life—whether from wearables, social media, or any other medium—now has the potential to appear in your claim. Be mindful about what you share and where.

Wearable technology has changed personal injury law in ways that most people, including lawyers, are still figuring out. Your Fitbit, Apple Watch, Oura ring, or other device is not just a fitness tool. It is a continuous, objective record of your physical life, and it can be both a powerful advocate and a formidable adversary in litigation.

The good news is that, in the hands of a skilled personal injury attorney, your wearable data can be one of the most compelling pieces of evidence available to prove how an accident has affected your life. The data doesn't lie, doesn't get nervous on the witness stand, and doesn't contradict itself.

However, that same objectivity means you need to be thoughtful, consistent, and transparent with your legal team from day one. Your watch is watching. Make sure the story it tells is the one that helps you.