Nelson Advisors: Killer features Apple could build into Apple Health to compete with WHOOP and Oura

Nelson Advisors

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Nelson Advisors: Killer features Apple could build into Apple Health to compete with WHOOP and Oura

What Apple's health roadmap could look like over the next two years, the killer features it could build into Apple Health, the partnerships to watch, and the medical specialties it is most likely to target.

On the 9th of September 2026 Apple unveiled the Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4 alongside a redesigned Health app and for the first time the company said the quiet part out loud. Alongside a new "Health Sensing System" that samples heart rate every five seconds and HRV every five minutes, Apple introduced a 0–10 Readiness score, a Health Age metric inside a new Longevity tab, an Apple Intelligence driven Insights tab, and in app blood testing through Quest Diagnostics at $119 for more than 50 biomarkers.

Readiness, Health Age and lab panels are not features Apple invented. They are the three pillars that WHOOP and Oura have spent the last five years building their businesses on.

The timing is not accidental. WHOOP closed a $575 million Series G at a $10.1 billion valuation in March, with Abbott and the Mayo Clinic on the cap table and a stated intention to make that its last private round. Oura filed for a Nasdaq IPO in early September targeting a valuation north of $16 billion, on the back of $1.4 billion in trailing revenue growing 74% year on year, five million paying members and a 94% hardware-to-subscription conversion rate. Both companies have proven that consumers will pay a recurring fee for interpreted biometrics. Apple, which has never charged a penny for Apple Health, has now watched two upstarts build a combined $26 billion of enterprise value on top of a business model it chose not to pursue.

So is Apple coming for WHOOP and Oura? The short answer is yes, but not in the way most commentators expect. Apple is unlikely to try to out-WHOOP WHOOP. It is far more likely to reframe the category so that recovery scores become a commodity feature of the platform and the real battleground shifts to something only Apple can do at scale: turning a billion-plus devices into a clinically credible, longitudinal health record with a services layer on top.

We set out what that could look like between now and autumn 2028.

Where Apple actually stands today

It is worth being precise about Apple's starting position, because it is stronger and weaker than it looks.

On hardware, Apple is well ahead. The Series 11 in September 2025 brought FDA cleared hypertension notifications, a Sleep Score and heart-rate sensing in the AirPods Pro 3. Series 12 adds a new LED array with better skin contact and the 60x increase in heart rate sampling that underpins Readiness. Apple already has FDA cleared ECG, irregular rhythm notifications, sleep apnoea notifications, hearing aid functionality in AirPods and a hypertension algorithm developed on data from more than 100,000 participants. No other consumer wearable company comes close to that regulatory portfolio.

On software and services, Apple has been behind, and it knows it. The much-rumoured "Health+" AI coach, code named Project Mulberry, was scaled back in February 2026 after Eddy Cue took over the health division following Jeff Williams' retirement. Bloomberg's reporting was blunt: Cue concluded that WHOOP and Oura were shipping "more compelling and useful features" and that Apple's plan "didn't meet that bar". Rather than a big-bang subscription launch, Mulberry's components are now arriving piecemeal. The Insights tab, Readiness, Health Age and the camera based fitness assessment in the redesigned Health app are the first tranche. The AI health chatbot, walking pattern analysis and health-aware Siri are still to come.

That reorganisation matters for the two year outlook. Apple's health division is now run by its services chief, whose remit is recurring revenue, not by its operations chief. The strategic question inside Apple is no longer whether health should be a services business; it is how and when.

The next two years: a plausible Apple roadmap

Nobody outside Cupertino has the roadmap, but Apple's cadence is predictable enough to sketch a credible one. Here is what we think the next four release cycles could look like.

Autumn 2026 (now): the catch-up release. Series 12 and iOS 27 close the feature gap on Readiness, Health Age and labs. The redesigned Health app launches in US English only later this year, which tells you Apple is still tuning the Apple Intelligence layer. Expect the AI chatbot for wellness questions to arrive in a point release over winter, and expect Apple to spend the next six months quietly measuring how many users actually open the Insights tab every day. That engagement number will decide everything that follows.

Spring 2027: the services test. Once Apple has daily-active data on Insights and Readiness, the logical next step is a paid tier. We think Apple is more likely to fold health into Apple One and Fitness+ than to launch a standalone Health+ at first, using Fitness+ as the wrapper for personalised training plans driven by Readiness and Health Age. The Quest lab panel is the first explicit health transaction inside the Health app, and it establishes a commerce rail Apple can extend to repeat testing, specialist panels and eventually prescription services.

Autumn 2027: the sensor release. Reports point to blood-pressure sensing hardware being explored for the Ultra line and to a leadership change on the non-invasive glucose project, with Zongjian Chen taking over in May 2026 in what Bloomberg framed as a sign the work is "finally progressing". Optical glucose remains years away, but a cuffless blood-pressure estimate, sitting alongside the already-cleared hypertension notification, is the feature most likely to ship in 2027. The Ultra 4's two-day battery is the other tell: Apple needs multi-day wear for overnight vitals, which is exactly where Oura's ring wins today.

Spring to autumn 2028: the form-factor question. The "iRing" rumour resurfaced in June 2026 via prototype collector Kosutami, and Bloomberg has hinted at a "subtle" health and control wearable. We are sceptical of an Apple ring in this window, because it would cannibalise the Watch, but a low-cost, sensor-only band or a health-focused AirPods product that captures overnight vitals is plausible. Apple's real answer to the ring is not another ring. It is spreading sensing across Watch, AirPods and iPhone camera so that the data set is complete regardless of which devices you wear to bed.

Killer features Apple could build into Apple Health

The features that would actually hurt WHOOP and Oura are not the ones that copy them. They are the ones that exploit assets neither company has.

A longitudinal, clinically legible health record. Apple Health already ingests medical records from thousands of providers in the US and UK, medications, lab results, immunisations and every sensor stream from Watch and AirPods. If Apple Intelligence can synthesise that into a single narrative, a Health Age that is informed by your actual LDL, HbA1c and blood pressure trend rather than just your HRV, it becomes something WHOOP Age and Oura's Cardiovascular Age cannot match. WHOOP has partnered with HealthEx for EHR syncing precisely because it lacks this; Apple has had it since 2018.

Readiness with medical context. WHOOP's and Oura's recovery scores are elegant but blind to clinical state. Apple can annotate Readiness with the fact that you started a beta blocker last week, that your hypertension notification fired, or that your latest Quest panel showed low ferritin. Readiness that explains why you are not recovering, using medication and lab data, is a categorically different product from readiness that tells you your HRV is down.

Passive screening at population scale. Apple's strongest muscle is turning a validation study into an FDA-cleared notification and pushing it to hundreds of millions of wrists overnight. Hypertension, atrial fibrillation and sleep apnoea are done. The next candidates are already visible in the Apple Health Study launched with Brigham and Women's in February 2025: gait and fall-risk from iPhone motion, cognitive decline from typing and speech patterns, early respiratory infection from overnight vitals and hearing loss progression from AirPods. Each one is a feature WHOOP or Oura could build; none is a feature they could get cleared and deployed at Apple's scale.

Camera as sensor. The new fitness assessment that uses the iPhone camera to estimate VO2 max, flexibility, strength and balance is the first glimpse of what may become Apple's most underrated health input. Visual Intelligence nutrition scoring, mole and skin tracking, wound monitoring, posture and movement analysis are all within reach of the phone in your pocket, and none of them need a ring.

A women's health platform, not just cycle tracking. iOS 27 adds perimenopause and menopause detection with notifications for users over 40. WHOOP's female membership grew 150% year on year and Oura's core demographic skews female; both have leaned into pregnancy, fertility and hormonal insights. Apple's advantage is the ability to link cycle data to temperature from Watch, sleep from AirPods, labs from Quest and clinician records from Health Records, then hand it to a Fitness+ programme built for that life stage. This is a segment where Apple has historically under invested and where the upside is large.

Care coordination and the "Health Wallet". Apple Wallet already holds insurance cards in the US. A Health app that can book the lab, hold the result, share it with your GP via Health Records, surface it in a Siri conversation and flag it in Readiness is a care navigation layer, not a wellness app. That is the feature that would make a WHOOP or Oura subscription feel narrow by comparison.

Partnerships to expect

Apple does not acquire its way into categories; it partners, learns and then internalises.

The Quest deal is the template and it is worth reading closely because WHOOP signed the same partner a year earlier for its 65-biomarker Advanced Labs. Apple matched the price point and the location footprint.

Here is where we expect the next deals.

Diagnostics and continuous glucose. Oura's integration with Dexcom's Stelo over-the-counter CGM, and Dexcom's equity investment in Oura, gave the ring a metabolic story before Apple had one. Until Apple's optical glucose project matures, the fastest route to metabolic health is a first-party integration with Dexcom or Abbott's Libre, surfacing glucose curves in Insights and correlating them with meals captured by Visual Intelligence. Abbott's decision to invest in WHOOP's Series G suggests the CGM makers are hedging; Apple has the leverage to demand a deeper integration than either rival can.

Pharma and clinical research. Apple's first pharma study was with GSK, and the Apple Health Study is designed as a permanent research platform. Expect Apple to formalise a research partner programme for pharma sponsors who want decentralised trials running on Watch and iPhone, particularly in cardiometabolic disease, sleep and neurology. This is a revenue line WHOOP and Oura cannot access at scale, and it feeds the validation data Apple needs for the next round of FDA clearances.

Health systems and payers. In the US, the obvious partners are the large integrated systems that already support Health Records, plus Medicare Advantage plans looking to subsidise devices for hypertension and atrial fibrillation management. In the UK, the NHS App and the Federated Data Platform are the integration points, and an Apple hypertension or sleep-apnoea pathway that feeds directly into primary care triage would be a genuine differentiator for the UK market. The commercial model here is a per-member subsidy paid by the payer rather than the consumer, which neatly sidesteps Apple's reluctance to charge for Health.

Telehealth and clinician access. WHOOP's on-demand clinician video consultations, announced in May 2026, are its bid to close the loop from insight to action. Apple is unlikely to employ clinicians, but it will need a fulfilment partner if Insights is going to recommend follow-up. Whether that is a telehealth network, a retail pharmacy chain or a direct link to the user's own provider via Health Records is one of the more interesting strategic choices of the next two years.

Employers and insurers outside the US. Oura counts the US Department of Defense among its largest enterprise customers. WHOOP has built an enterprise channel with sports teams and employers. Apple has largely left this segment to partners such as Vitality, but a Health Age metric that employers and insurers can incentivise against is the kind of feature that makes an enterprise programme worth building.

Medical specialties Apple is most likely to target

Apple's pattern is to pick conditions that are common, under-diagnosed, detectable from passive optical or motion data, and have a clear clinical pathway when flagged. On that basis, the next two years are likely to concentrate on five areas.

Cardiology and cardiometabolic disease remains the centre of gravity. Hypertension notification is live; cuffless blood-pressure estimation and better arrhythmia detection are the natural extensions, and the sub-five-second heart-rate sampling in Series 12 is effectively a platform for both. Heart-failure decompensation monitoring, using resting heart rate, respiratory rate and overnight SpO2, is the high-value clinical use case that sits just beyond.

Sleep medicine is the specialty where Oura is strongest and where Apple has been weakest, because the Watch is uncomfortable to wear overnight and needs charging. Sleep apnoea notifications and the Sleep Score changed that. The Ultra 4 battery, AirPods-based overnight sensing and a Readiness score that depends on sleep quality all point to Apple treating sleep as a primary battleground rather than an afterthought.

Metabolic health and endocrinology, particularly prediabetes and weight management, is the fastest-growing consumer health category in the world thanks to GLP-1 medications. Oura already tracks GLP-1 use and syncs CGM data; WHOOP has weight-management features. Apple's Visual Intelligence nutrition scoring and the Quest metabolic panel are the opening moves. A GLP-1 companion experience — dosing reminders, side-effect tracking, muscle-preservation training plans via Fitness+ — would be an obvious and lucrative addition.

Women's health and menopause is under-served and under-monetised across the whole industry. The iOS 27 perimenopause features, combined with Watch temperature sensing and the labs rail, give Apple the ingredients for a proper mid-life women's health programme, and Fitness+ already has content built for it.

Neurology and healthy ageing is the long-term play. Health Age and the Longevity tab are consumer framing for what is really a healthy-ageing platform. Gait analysis, fall detection and prediction, cognitive screening from device interaction, and hearing health from AirPods together form the basis of a proposition for the over-60s that neither WHOOP, with its athlete heritage, nor Oura is positioned to deliver. This is also the demographic with the highest healthcare spend and the strongest willingness to pay.

Mental health is the notable omission. Apple has a State of Mind logging feature and has studied depression screening, but has been cautious about clinical claims. We would expect mood and stress insights to arrive inside the Insights tab rather than as a standalone specialty.

What this means for WHOOP and Oura

It would be easy to conclude that Apple's move spells trouble for both. The reality is more nuanced, and the two companies face different risks.

WHOOP is the more exposed. Its differentiation has been the recovery score, the coaching layer and, more recently, medical-grade features like the FDA-cleared ECG and blood-pressure insights on the WHOOP MG. Apple now has a Readiness score, a deeper regulatory portfolio, and the same lab partner at the same price. WHOOP's year-long dispute with the FDA over its blood-pressure feature, only resolved when the agency changed its wellness guidance in January and closed the warning letter in June, is a reminder that the medical-grade positioning cuts both ways. WHOOP's counter is its screenless, always-on form factor, its athlete community, its rapidly growing female membership and the on-demand clinician layer. Its $1.1 billion bookings run rate at 103% growth is real, but a public-market investor will now price in Apple as a direct competitor rather than a complementary platform.

Oura is better insulated, for three reasons. First, the ring form factor is a genuine preference for a large segment who will not sleep in a watch, and Apple's answer to that is at least two years away. Second, Oura has 76% of the smart-ring market and a partnership strategy — Dexcom, Carrot Fertility, the Department of Defense, and integrations with Apple Health itself — that makes it a data source for the Apple ecosystem rather than an enemy of it. Third, its 94% subscription conversion and 55% gross margin give it the economics to keep investing in software. Oura's risk is different: if Apple makes Readiness, Health Age and sleep insights free on a $399 Watch, the willingness to pay $5.99 a month for a ring that does the same things gets tested, and the IPO valuation assumes it holds.

The wider read-across for healthtech founders and investors is the one we see most often at Nelson Advisors. When a platform owner enters a category, the companies that survive are the ones with a proprietary sensing modality, a clinical or enterprise distribution channel the platform cannot easily replicate, or a form factor the platform chooses not to build. Feature parity is not a moat. WHOOP and Oura both know this, which is why one is racing towards clinical services and the other towards an IPO before the Series 12 lands on wrists on 18 September.

Conclusion

Apple is coming for the category WHOOP and Oura built, but it is doing so on its own terms.

The next two years will see Apple commoditise recovery scores, longevity metrics and lab testing as free features of the Health app, then build a services and partnership layer above them that draws on assets no rival has: a billion sensors, an FDA clearance machine, Health Records, Apple Intelligence and a services chief who now runs health. Cardiology, sleep, metabolic health, women's health and healthy ageing are the specialties where that layer will show up first.

For WHOOP the question is whether medical-grade positioning and clinician access are enough to justify a premium subscription against a free Apple equivalent. For Oura the question is whether the ring remains a preference or becomes a niche.

For everyone else in digital health, the question is the one we always come back to: when Apple decides your feature is a platform feature, do you build, buy, partner or sell?

Nelson Advisors > European HealthTech, MedTech, Digital Health Investment Banking

Nelson Advisors specialise in Mergers and Acquisitions, Partnerships and Investments for Digital Health, HealthTech, MedTech, Health IT, Consumer HealthTech, Healthcare Cybersecurity, Healthcare AI companies.www.nelsonadvisors.co.uk

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