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Many countries around the world are facing a shortage of healthcare resources, especially during the post-epidemic era, leading to a dramatic increase in the need for self-detection and self-management of diseases. The popularity of smart wearable devices, such as smartwatches, and the development of machine learning bring new opportunities for the early detection and management of various prevalent diseases, such as cardiovascular diseases, Parkinson’s disease, and diabetes. In this survey, we comprehensively review the articles related to specific diseases or health issues based on small wearable devices and machine learning. More specifically, we first present an overview of the articles selected and classify them according to their targeted diseases. Then, we summarize their objectives, wearable device and sensor data, machine learning techniques, and wearing locations. Based on the literature review, we discuss the challenges and propose future directions from the perspectives of privacy concerns, security concerns, transmission latency and reliability, energy consumption, multi-modality, multi-sensor, multi-devices, evaluation metrics, explainability, generalization and personalization, social influence, and human factors, aiming to inspire researchers in this field.