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This is Optimizer, a weekly newsletter sent every Friday from Verge senior reviewer Victoria Song that dissects and discusses the latest phones, smartwatches, apps, and other gizmos that swear they’re going to change your life. Optimizer arrives in our subscribers’ inboxes at 10AM ET. Opt in for Optimizer here.
At CES 2026 this week, people kept asking me what health tech I was seeing on the show floor. My only answer was this: bodily fluids. As in urine, blood, sweat, and saliva.
With most people, my response typically got a handful of groans and raised eyebrows. Among insiders, I surprised no one.
CES is ground zero of the wellness wild west. At Eureka Park and the Venetian Expo, you’ll find dozens of digital health startups hawking everything from smartwatches and smart rings to smart pillows. This isn’t new, per se. Urine tech in particular has always been a staple at the show, but what’s notable this year isn’t simply the presence of this tech — it’s the idea that mining these fluids can help you live longer and healthier.
I wasn’t kidding about sperm microscopes.
Here’s some of what I saw: at-home hormone testing kits using urine and saliva; smart menstrual pads and panty liners; an in-toilet hydration tracker; a mirror that analyzes your facial blood flow to estimate how well you’re aging; a sperm microscope; and a smart scale that analyzes metabolic health through foot sweat.
It’s not just tiny startups, either. Bigger names in the space are also opening their platforms to accommodate data sources beyond heart rate. At the show, Withings announced it was partnering with Abbott to integrate the latter’s continuous glucose monitors (CGMs). Oura has a similar partnership with Dexcom that was announced in 2025. Whoop also added the ability to get blood panel data integrated into its app last year, followed soon by Oura, and now Ultrahuman is doing the same.
At the core, this fixation on bodily fluids is evidence that the entire industry is doubling down on metabolic health as the next frontier. Where digital health started with cardiovascular health, the next phase hinges on your metabolism. So after logging tens of thousands of steps on the show floor, I sat down with Oura CEO Tom Hale and Dexcom CEO Jake Leach to talk about where metabolic tech is going, the challenges ahead, and what we’re likely to see as consumers.
This longevity mirror reads the blood flow in your face and somehow estimates your metabolic health.
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