An eighty-year-old friend of mine still travels internationally every month. She keeps a pace that makes her younger friends tired just hearing her itinerary. When she learned what we were building at Cirdia, she didn’t ask if she could be a beta tester. She insisted. For her, wellness isn't about extending capacity. It’s about protecting the freedom she’s already earned.
My partner, at sixty, approaches it differently. He’s working harder than ever to maintain strength and muscle mass, noticing how recovery stretches longer than it used to. Every workout now includes a calculation: how to push enough to stay strong without stealing energy from tomorrow. He wants the numbers. They help him see what’s working.
And then there’s a friend in her early fifties, learning to read her body’s new signals during menopause. When hot flashes cluster, her sleep suffers for days afterward, cascading into everything else. She’s learning to interpret patterns she never had to notice before. Other friends are navigating the in-between, adjusting to new sleep rhythms, caring for aging parents, rediscovering what “fit” even means in a body that keeps changing its mind.
Same general life stage. Completely different rhythms, priorities, and measures of success. Not a monolith, but a constellation.
The Wide Middle
Call it midlife and beyond, roughly 40 through 75 and older. It’s the stage where wellness tools fail fastest.
Nearly four in ten fitness trackers are abandoned within six months, but the drop isn’t even across age groups. Around 40% of adults under 35 use a wearable device, compared with only 17% of adults over 50. Engagement falls as we age, even among people who once used these tools daily.
Research on exercise motivation shows why. Younger users often respond to competition and external rewards. With age, motivation becomes more intrinsic—focused on personal meaning, enjoyment, and sustained health rather than streaks or scores. The tools don’t adapt to that shift, so users quietly set them aside.
These shifts in motivation mirror what’s happening physically. Midlife is also the span where bone density, muscle preservation, cardiovascular health, and balance all matter deeply. But how they show up, when they shift, and what we focus on vary widely from person to person. Some are building capacity for adventures ahead. Others are maintaining the independence they have. Some are catching subtle changes before they become problems. Others are rebuilding after health events or major transitions.
The variation isn’t predictable by age alone. It’s shaped by biology, circumstance, and what the body is saying right now. You can feel it if you’re paying attention.
Bodies That Change the Rules
Midlife and later life aren’t static chapters. They’re laboratories where the rules of the body rewrite themselves, sometimes slowly, sometimes overnight.
For women, menopause isn’t a moment but a multi-year transition that reshapes energy, sleep, temperature regulation, and recovery. Hot flashes don’t just interrupt comfort; they disrupt sleep architecture in ways that echo through daily life. For men, testosterone’s gradual decline shifts muscle maintenance and recovery in subtler but steady ways. Yet most wearables still apply the same default thresholds to everyone.
Muscle preservation becomes an active practice. According to NIH research in 2023, we lose between three and eight percent of muscle mass per decade after 30, and the rate accelerates after 60. Bone density peaks in our 30s and declines from there, especially sharply for women post-menopause. Balance, the quiet skill that once required no thought, starts demanding attention. These aren’t failures of maintenance. They’re transitions. And they’re exactly when understanding patterns matters most, because wellness habits built now compound over decades.
What’s striking is how differently these shifts unfold. For some, the changes are subtle: a few more minutes of stretching, a slightly earlier bedtime. For others, they arrive as sharp reminders: a strained tendon, a restless night, a new medication that alters recovery. The through-line isn’t decline. It’s variation.
That variation isn’t a problem to fix. It’s a signal to follow. And yet, that’s exactly where today’s wellness tools lose their way.
The Loyalty Opportunity
We talk about this period as if it were a single demographic. But it’s not a lane. It’s a landscape where health, capability, and independence shift with every contour of age and circumstance.
The industry calls this diversity “hard to serve.” That’s backward. Sports markets learned long ago that specialization creates loyalty—running watches for runners, cycling computers for cyclists, climbing apps for climbers. No one called those segments difficult. They called them opportunities.
Midlife and beyond need a different kind of specialization—not by sport, but by life pattern. Tools must adapt to changing bodies and goals. Systems must protect intimate health data as fiercely as they track it. Both are achievable when technology is built around the person, not the platform.
People in midlife and beyond don’t churn because they’re fickle. They churn because the product stopped fitting. As earlier data shows, many devices are set aside within months—a symptom of design that doesn’t evolve with its users. The loss isn’t just hardware. It’s trust, and with it, decades of potential loyalty.
The market still treats that as a niche problem. It’s not. It’s the biggest opportunity in wellness. Design something that grows with people and they’ll stay for decades. A 45-year-old who finds a tool that adapts could still be using it at 75. That’s not a product cycle. It’s a lifetime relationship.
Closing the Loop
Midlife isn’t a monolith. It’s a moving target, and that’s its power. The market that calls it complicated keeps mistaking complexity for confusion. We don’t abandon wellness tools because we change. We abandon them because the tools don’t change with us.
Adaptability is how we stay connected to the long arc of our own health. But adaptability only works when it’s built on trust. Trust that the tool understands context. Trust that our patterns belong to us. Trust that our data will never be used against us.
These transitions are personal. You notice them before anyone else does, which makes the question of who else sees your data even more pressing. A system that doesn’t understand context can’t be trusted with patterns. And a tool that knows this much about you must earn, and keep, your confidence.
Technology that understands context doesn’t need to control it. It can guide, illuminate, and protect. That’s the point.
That’s where we’ll go next: what it means to build wellness technology that works like a copilot, not a spy.
→ Next in the series: Your Body Data Should Work Like a Copilot, Not a Spy.
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1 Gartner, Wearables Market Survey, 2016, Insight Centre 2023, “Your Fitness Tracker and You”.
2 Frontiers in Digital Health, “Wearable Use in an Observational Study Among Older Adults,” 2022
3 Dacey M et al., Older Adults’ Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation Toward Physical Activity, Am J Health Behav, 2008.
4 National Institutes of Health, Sarcopenia and Aging, 2023.
5 NIH, Osteoporosis and Related Bone Diseases Resource Center, 2023.