The Internet of Bodies (IoB) is a network of smart devices that connect to, sit inside, or are embedded within the human body and transmit health and biometric data over the internet. Think of it as the Internet of Things, but the “thing” is you. These devices range from fitness trackers on your wrist to pacemakers in your chest, and they’re reshaping how medicine works while raising serious questions about privacy, security, and who owns the data your body produces.
Three Tiers of Connected Body Technology
Researchers at the RAND Corporation describe three generations of IoB devices, each one more intimately connected to the body than the last.
Body-external devices sit on the surface of your body. Smartwatches, fitness bands, and continuous glucose monitors that stick to your skin all fall here. They collect data like heart rate, sleep patterns, blood oxygen, and steps, then send it to an app or a cloud server. This is the tier most people already interact with daily.
Body-internal devices are placed inside the body, usually through a medical procedure. Pacemakers that transmit heart rhythm data to a cardiologist, insulin pumps that adjust dosing based on real-time glucose readings, and digital pills equipped with tiny sensors that confirm whether a medication was actually swallowed all qualify. These devices don’t just monitor. They actively intervene, making treatment decisions or alerting doctors when something goes wrong.
Body-melded devices represent the most advanced tier, where the line between technology and biology blurs. Brain-computer interfaces that interpret neural signals fall into this category. These are still largely experimental, but the technology is progressing quickly enough that governance experts already consider them part of the IoB conversation.
How IoB Devices Work in Healthcare
The most impactful IoB applications right now are medical. A connected pacemaker can send a stream of heart activity data to a healthcare provider without the patient needing to visit a clinic. If an irregular rhythm develops at 3 a.m., the device flags it immediately rather than waiting for a scheduled checkup weeks later. Insulin pumps paired with continuous glucose monitors create what’s essentially an artificial pancreas, reading blood sugar levels and delivering precise doses of insulin in response, minute by minute.
Digital pills take this a step further. A patient swallows a pill containing a grain-sized sensor. When stomach acid activates the sensor, it sends a signal to a wearable patch, which relays the information to a phone app and, from there, to the prescribing doctor. This lets providers confirm that a patient is taking medication on schedule, which matters enormously for conditions like schizophrenia or tuberculosis where missed doses can have serious consequences.
Beyond individual devices, the real power of IoB lies in aggregation. When thousands of pacemakers or glucose monitors feed data into the same system, patterns emerge that no single doctor could spot. Hospitals and researchers can identify early warning signs of complications across entire populations, potentially catching problems before they become emergencies.
Who Owns Your Body’s Data?
This is where IoB gets uncomfortable. Every heartbeat logged by a pacemaker, every blood sugar reading from an insulin pump, and every sleep cycle tracked by a wristband generates data. That data has to go somewhere, and the question of who controls it, who can access it, and what they can do with it remains largely unresolved.
Many IoB devices collect data under broad consent agreements, meaning users sign off on vague terms that don’t fully explain how their information will be used. People often don’t realize the extent to which their data can be shared with third parties or the kinds of inferences that can be drawn from analyzing it. Your resting heart rate variability alone can reveal information about stress levels, cardiovascular risk, and even mental health status.
De-identification, the practice of stripping names and other identifiers from health data, is supposed to protect privacy. But it’s less effective than most people assume. Researchers have demonstrated that for the vast majority of Americans, de-identified genetic data can be reattached to the person who provided the original sample. When your IoB device is generating continuous biometric data that’s unique to your body, true anonymity becomes extremely difficult to guarantee.
The situation is compounded by the fact that when de-identified data is publicly available, no consent is required from the person who generated it. A company could, in theory, collect aggregate biometric data from wearable devices and sell insights derived from it without ever notifying the individuals involved.
Cybersecurity Risks Are Physical Risks
When a hacker breaches a laptop, you lose files or passwords. When a hacker breaches a device inside your body, the consequences are fundamentally different. IoB security vulnerabilities aren’t abstract. They can directly threaten physical safety.
The most alarming documented case involved implantable cardiac devices from a major manufacturer that were found to have critical security flaws. Those vulnerabilities could have been exploited to drain the device’s battery remotely or cause it to deliver incorrect electrical shocks to the heart. The devices were eventually patched through a firmware update, but the incident exposed how high the stakes are when medical hardware connects to the internet.
The attack surface for IoB devices is broad. Data travels from the device to a phone, from the phone to a cloud server, and from the server to a healthcare provider’s system. Each hop is a potential point of interception. Many IoB devices also run on low-power processors with limited capacity for encryption or advanced security protocols, making them inherently harder to protect than a standard computer.
For patients, this creates a difficult tradeoff. A connected insulin pump that adjusts dosing in real time can be lifesaving. But that same connectivity introduces a risk that a non-connected device simply wouldn’t have. Right now, the medical benefits generally outweigh the cybersecurity risks, but the gap narrows as adoption grows and more devices come online.
How IoB Devices Are Regulated
In the United States, IoB medical devices fall under the FDA’s existing framework for regulating medical hardware. Devices considered high-risk, like implantable pacemakers and insulin pumps, are classified as Class III and require premarket approval. This is the most rigorous pathway, demanding clinical studies that demonstrate both safety and effectiveness before the device can be sold.
Lower-risk devices, like many wearable fitness monitors, may only need to demonstrate that they’re substantially equivalent to a product already on the market. Some are exempt from premarket review entirely. This tiered system means that the smartwatch tracking your heart rate and the pacemaker regulating it go through very different levels of scrutiny, even though both are generating and transmitting sensitive health data.
The regulatory gap that concerns experts most isn’t the devices themselves but the data they produce. The FDA oversees whether a device is safe and effective as a piece of hardware. It has far less authority over what happens to the continuous stream of biometric information that device generates once it leaves the clinical setting. Data governance, in many cases, falls to a patchwork of privacy laws that weren’t designed with body-connected technology in mind.
The Scale of What’s Coming
IoB technology is not a niche concept. The broader market for internet-connected behavioral and biometric technology was valued at roughly $716 billion in 2025 and is projected to exceed $5 trillion by 2034, growing at nearly 25% per year. That growth is being driven by falling sensor costs, improvements in wireless connectivity, and a healthcare industry increasingly focused on remote monitoring and personalized treatment.
What this means in practical terms is that the number of devices collecting data from your body is going to increase dramatically over the next decade. Wearables will get more sophisticated, implantable devices will get smaller and more capable, and the volume of biometric data flowing through cloud servers will multiply. The technology is moving faster than the rules governing it, which makes the privacy and security questions not just theoretical but urgent.