🔗 Share this article Is It Possible I'm Dependent on This Smartwatch? Many runners catch themselves checking their watches numerous times during a race. A sense of building tension. Visible is the frosty air exhaled by my competitors as they do the "about to run" jiggle on the beginning point. A rapid twitch of the hips. I'm at my local weekly parkrun event and I'm serious. Three, two, one... Wait a second. I need to sort my device. So does the runner beside me. The person waiting expresses impatience. I won't start until… there! Signal acquired, I'm off. In the mele, it's challenging to spot a wrist without a fitness tracker on it. And it's not just us runners who rely on them. It's a explosive, multi-billion pound industry. Names like Apple Watch dominate, featuring an wide range of various models to suit a range of budgets. Depending on how advanced the device you choose, price tags can vary between a hundred pounds to a small fortune. "It makes me crazy, I can't stop checking." "It reassures me… It's like a supporter encouraging me." "Please don't notify me about a bad night's sleep." A small sample of the comments I've received from other device users when I inquire what they their opinion is on theirs. Many users are frequently questioning whether the data they're seeing is accurate. The Monitoring Conundrum My current opinion on mine? At this moment, irritating. It's indicating I'm not hitting my target, leading me to doubt whether the trees I'm running below are disrupting my location tracking. Millions of us strap these compact monitors onto our wrists and keep them on 24/7, seemingly unconcerned with the fact they're continuously tracking us. A distant memory are the days when we used them only to give us an rough count of our daily steps. Today, they can analyse our sleep patterns, heart rate, glucose levels, our body battery. It's tricky to find a bodily function they don't track. But do they do what they advertise? And are the statistics we scrutinise a accurate representation of reality? Do they improve our overall health, or do the plethora of metrics and constant notifications just add to our everyday anxiety? Some users find the multitude of functions on their smartwatches to be "overwhelming" at times. A Complicated Bond "I find myself getting a a little preoccupied with mine," an individual admits. While she loves how her device records her exercise, she finds some of its other functions "excessive" at times - a feeling that became apparent during a significant period. Before she realised she could put it into a specific mode, her smartwatch kept telling her she was being insufficiently energetic enough. Now, 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've not slept," she says. "I know that perfectly well." Couldn't she just take it off? "I could, theoretically, but I have this love-hate relationship with it," she explains. "I value it for its fitness insights, I just wonder whether all the other things it can now do is possibly too much for me." The Technology Behind the Tracking Different brands of smartwatch has its own novel way of measuring your health metrics and processing your data, but the most use detectors on the underside of the watch. They typically shine minute LED lights onto your arm which can monitor capillary action, identifying your pulse rate. Higher-end devices detect changes in the electrical current that flows through the skin to assess your stress levels. Expert Perspectives One expert says that overall for smartwatches, it's a "fine balance" - while the ever-evolving tech could potentially save lives, "identifying issues before we feel unwell", it could also turn us the tracked into the "worried well". He points out that newer wearables can conduct tests like medical-grade monitoring, which continuously monitor how stable the heart is. They can notify if someone is experiencing a heart arrhythmia, where there is abnormal impulses in the heart causing an arrhythmia. This does not automatically signal someone is about to have a heart attack, but it can give an advance notice they might be more vulnerable of a heart problem in the long term. But how to make sense of these readings is complex. The expert fears that as further capabilities are introduced, people may struggle to fully contextualise their data. "I'm not entirely convinced that the ability to monitor so many things is such a good idea," he says. A health researcher focusing on patient behaviour echoes this sentiment. Her work into the impact of wearable tech on a cohort of individuals with health issues suggested a noticeable percentage of those who were given devices to monitor their condition experienced greater stress and were "had a higher tendency to use healthcare resources". She identified a cycle with her patients - they spotted a worrying figure on their watch. They grew concerned. Their pulse increased. They got more worried. They re-examined the data, and their heart rate increased again. "If we see data about ourselves that we lack context for then, naturally, we are going to become concerned," the psychologist says. "We check, we re-check - it becomes a vicious cycle."