🔗 Share this article

A sense of building tension. I can see the chilled vapour emanating from my fellow runners as they perform the "starting line" wiggle on the starting line.

A quick movement of the hips.

I'm lined up for my local Saturday morning race and I mean business. Three, two, one...

Hold on. I have to start my device. So does the person alongside me.

The person in the line expresses impatience. I'm not moving until… done! Connection established, away I go.

In the mele, it's challenging to see a person without a fitness tracker on it. And this extends beyond us participants who use them.

It's a explosive, multi-billion dollar market. Companies like Apple Watch dominate, featuring an wide array of diverse devices to fit a range of lifestyles. Depending on how feature-packed the device you go for, prices can vary between a hundred pounds to thousands of pounds.

"I find it infuriating, I'm unable to switch off."

"It reassures me… It's like a companion guiding me."

"Please don't notify me I've had a poor sleep."

A handful of the responses people have shared from fellow smartwatch wearers when I ask what they think of theirs.

A Sea of Statistics

My current opinion on mine? Currently, frustrating. It's reporting I'm off pace, causing me to question whether the trees I'm passing under are interfering with my GPS connection.

Millions of us fasten these little devices onto our wrists and keep them on all day and night, ostensibly unconcerned with the fact they're continuously tracking us.

Long past are the days when we relied on them exclusively to give us an idea of our pedometer reading. Currently, they can measure our sleep quality, heart rate, oxygen saturation, our body battery.

It's a challenge to find a physical metric they fail to monitor.

But do they do what they claim to do? And are the statistics we scrutinise a faithful picture of our actual health? Do they improve our daily wellness, or do the plethora of metrics and cheerleading alerts just increase our sense of overwhelm?

Addiction or Aid?

"I find myself getting a bit fixated with mine," a wearer admits.

While she loves how her device tracks her workouts, she finds some of its other capabilities "overwhelming" at times - a feeling initially realised during a major life event.

Before she realised she could put it into a specific mode, her smartwatch repeatedly informed her she was failing to be productive enough. Later on, the watch insists her she's had a restless night.

"I am caring for a six-month old, it's unnecessary for me to be notified I'm tired," she says. "I'm acutely aware only too well."

Is it not possible to just remove it?

"I suppose I could, perhaps, but I'm in this love-hate relationship with it," she explains. "I love it for its workout tracking, but I'm unsure whether the additional features it can now do is possibly overkill for me."

Inside the Device

Every device of smartwatch has its own novel way of tracking your health metrics and processing your data, but the most use sensors on the reverse of the watch.

They typically project small, green LED lights onto your wrist which can observe blood flow, detecting your BPM. More advanced devices detect changes in the electrical current that passes over the skin to assess your stress levels.

The Professional Viewpoint

A professor says that in general for smartwatches, it's a "fine balance" - while the continuously improving tech could potentially save lives, "spotting abnormalities before we notice anything", it could also turn us device users into the "worried well".

He points out that the most advanced wearables can conduct tests like electrocardiograms (ECGs), which constantly monitor how healthy the heart is. They can alert if someone is experiencing atrial fibrillation (AF), where there is erratic impulses in the heart causing an arrhythmia.

This does not mean someone is about to have a heart attack, but it can give an preliminary indication they might be more susceptible of a blood clot in the future.

But how to understand these readings is not straightforward. The expert fears that as more functions are introduced, people may not be able to fully contextualise their data.

"I remain sceptical that the ability to monitor so many metrics is such a good idea," he says.

A health researcher focusing on patient behaviour echoes this sentiment. Her work into the effect of wearable tech on a set of cardiovascular patients suggested a minority of those who were given devices to monitor their condition experienced increased anxiety and were "far more likely to use medical services".

She noted a vicious circle with her patients - they saw a concerning reading on their watch. They felt anxious. Their BPM increased. They got increasingly anxious. They checked again, and their heart rate increased again.

"Upon viewing data about ourselves that we don't really understand then, understandably, we are going to become concerned," the psychologist says. "We look, we obsess - it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy."