Consumer wearables have followed a remarkably consistent path over the past two decades. Early devices counted steps. Later generations measured heart rate, sleep quality, recovery, blood oxygen, and other biometric signals that gave people a clearer picture of their physical health. What began as simple activity tracking gradually evolved into a sophisticated ecosystem of devices capable of monitoring the body almost continuously.
That progression has led some technology companies to ask whether the next opportunity lies beyond physical health altogether.
The argument is not that wearables have reached their limit. Rather, it is that they have solved one side of a much larger problem. Millions of people now understand how they sleep, how quickly they recover from exercise, and how their heart responds to stress, yet they have almost no comparable visibility into the conversations, relationships, decisions, and communication habits that often shape their lives far more profoundly.
Lyle Maxson believes those experiences represent the next frontier for wearable technology.
“The next logical frontier is understanding the mind,” says Maxson, founder and CEO of ABOVE. “Not in the sense of reading thoughts, but understanding the patterns that shape our lives—our communication, relationships, decision-making, emotional wellbeing, leadership, and personal growth.”
That premise has given rise to what Maxson describes as cognitive wearables, devices designed to create long-term context around a person’s daily interactions rather than measuring biological signals alone. ABOVE, the company he founded, combines a wearable pendant with AI capable of recognizing patterns across conversations over extended periods of time.
The idea would have been difficult to build even a few years ago. Speech recognition had to become reliable in everyday environments. Large language models needed to move beyond generating text toward understanding context. Hardware became smaller, more power-efficient, and capable of operating comfortably throughout the day. Perhaps most importantly, AI systems developed increasingly sophisticated memory, allowing conversations to be connected over weeks, months, and eventually years instead of being treated as isolated events.
“In many ways, ABOVE isn’t just arriving because we had the idea first,” Maxson says. “It’s arriving because the underlying technologies have finally matured enough to make the vision possible.”
That technological convergence helps explain why cognitive wearables occupy a different space from existing AI products. Digital assistants answer questions. Productivity tools summarize meetings and organize information. Fitness devices monitor the body. None of those categories are primarily designed to help people understand how they communicate, how they make decisions, or which behavioral patterns continue repeating throughout their lives.
According to Maxson, that distinction is substantial enough to define an entirely new product category rather than an extension of an existing one.
Whenever a genuinely new category emerges, comparisons are almost unavoidable because consumers naturally reach for familiar reference points. Smartphones were initially compared to computers, electric vehicles to conventional automobiles, and early fitness trackers to digital watches. Cognitive wearables are likely to experience a similar transition before the category develops its own language and expectations.
That philosophy also influenced ABOVE’s decision to build hardware instead of launching as a software application.
Many of the moments that shape a person’s life are unplanned: a difficult conversation, an unexpected insight during a walk, constructive feedback from a colleague, or a discussion that changes the direction of a business. Requiring someone to remember to open an app before each of those moments would inevitably capture only a small portion of the experiences that matter.
“The wearable removes friction,” Maxson explains. “It allows technology to quietly observe life as it’s actually lived rather than asking people to change their behavior to accommodate the technology.”
Whether cognitive wearables ultimately become as familiar as smartwatches remains an open question, but the broader direction seems increasingly plausible. Consumer technology has spent years helping people quantify physical health, and advances in artificial intelligence are making it possible to build systems that understand context in ways that were previously out of reach.
If that capability continues to improve, the next generation of wearables may be judged less by how accurately they measure heart rate than by how effectively they help people understand themselves. For Maxson, that represents the larger objective.
“I hope we’ve helped establish an entirely new category of consumer technology—one centered not on measuring the body, but on understanding the mind,” he says.
