The flagship flex of 2022 is becoming a mid-tier default. Consumer ECG adoption roughly doubled in four years, even as wearables got cheaper.
In 2022, an electrocardiogram sensor was something you paid up for: a badge on the Apple Watch and a short list of premium Samsungs. By 2025 it’s showing up on nearly four in ten new wearable launches. Among the notable launches Fitness Tech Trends tracks, ECG adoption climbed from 19% in 2022 to 38% in 2025 (7 of 36 launches, then 10 of 26), rising every single year in between.
The move is more striking because it happened while wearables got cheaper, not pricier. Budget devices (sub-$300 watches, plus a wave of rings and bands that mostly don’t carry ECG at all) held near half of all launches the entire stretch. ECG’s share doubled anyway. The feature isn’t riding a premium wave; it’s leaking downward into the middle of the market.
Where the line stops, for now
ECG hasn’t gone truly cheap. The least expensive 2025 launch with a genuine consumer-ECG watch app landed at $349 (Samsung’s Galaxy Watch 8 and Coros’ NOMAD). That’s the current floor: ECG is now a mid-tier expectation, but the sub-$300 tier, where nearly half the market lives, still ships without it. The next competitive frontier is obvious. Whichever brand cracks a credible sub-$300 ECG watch gets to advertise a “clinical” sensor at an impulse-buy price.
It isn’t happening in isolation. Skin-temperature sensing followed the same curve over the window, 22% to 50% of tracked launches. The sensors that defined the health-watch flagship three years ago are becoming table stakes, which quietly raises the bar for what a $200 watch has to include to look competitive next year.
Cite this data: Fitness Tech Trends, “ECG Sensors Reached 38% of New Wearable Launches in 2025, Up From 19% in 2022” (2026). https://fitnesstechtrends.com/ecg-sensor-adoption-wearable-launches-2022-2025/
Methodology
Source: FTT wearables database, 159 verified records across 34 brands, last updated 2026-07-16. Cohort = launches with a release date in each calendar year (n = 36 / 33 / 29 / 26 for 2022-2025), de-duplicated on accent- and case-normalized brand + model.
ECG match: keyword match (ecg / electrical heart / electrocardiogram) against the sensors field. Chest-strap heart-rate monitors (e.g. Garmin HRM series) are excluded from ECG counts: their electrode-based “ECG heart rate” is not a consumer electrocardiogram feature.
Scope: figures describe FTT-tracked notable launches, not a census of every SKU shipped, and not market share. The sample skews toward Garmin. Entries with unverified specs are excluded.
