Abu Dhabi health group M42 has begun a pilot that pairs data from wearable devices with patients' own clinical records, starting with 10,000 people: 5,000 with kidney disease and 5,000 with diabetes.
The gap it is aimed at is familiar to anyone managing a chronic condition. A clinic visit every few weeks captures one hour of a patient's life; a wearable measures continuously. Feed that stream alongside the medical history and a deterioration can surface before the next appointment rather than after it. Dialysis patients are the clearest case, because the body swings considerably between haemodialysis sessions and much of that movement is invisible by the time the patient is next seen.
M42 chief executive Dimitris Moulavasilis was blunt about the condition for success, pointing out that prediction on its own achieves nothing: "You need to have the clinical care pathways to treat the people." Dr Asma Al Mannaei of the Department of Health - Abu Dhabi made a parallel argument, saying the emphasis has to be on translating innovation into healthcare rather than leaving these technologies parked at the research stage.
The programme sits on infrastructure the emirate has been building for years. Abu Dhabi Biobank has capacity for five million biological samples, and the Malaffi health information exchange already moves patient records between providers, which is what makes a continuous data feed clinically usable rather than just voluminous. Separately, M42 is working with Mammoth Biosciences on gene-editing therapies.
Diabetes and kidney disease are among the most expensive chronic conditions in the UAE, and both respond well to earlier intervention. The measure of this pilot, then, is not how much data the devices generate. It is whether fewer patients end up in an emergency admission that a timely phone call could have prevented.