🔗 Share this article

There's a nervous excitement. Apparent is the frosty air coming from my rivals as they execute the "starting line" shuffle on the starting line.

A rapid movement of the hips.

I'm lined up for my local weekly parkrun event and I mean business. Three, two, one...

Wait a second. I have to adjust my tracker. As does the runner beside me.

The person behind us sighs. I won't start until… yes! Connection established, and I'm running.

In the mele, it's challenging to see a person without a fitness tracker on it. And this isn't only us runners who use them.

This is a booming, multi-billion dollar industry. Names like Samsung Galaxy dominate, each with an wide selection of various devices to fit a variety of needs. According to how high tech the model you choose, costs can start from a hundred pounds to a significant investment.

"It drives me insane, I'm unable to relax."

"It comforts me… It feels like a friend encouraging me."

"I wish it wouldn't say I've had a restless night."

A small sample of the reactions I've received from like-minded smartwatch wearers when I inquire what they their opinion is on theirs.

The Monitoring Conundrum

My feelings on mine? At this moment, irritating. It's telling me I'm off pace, making me wonder whether the overhead branches I'm passing under are interfering with my GPS connection.

Millions of us fasten these compact gadgets onto our wrists and wear them all day and night, ostensibly at ease with the fact they're perpetually monitoring us.

Gone are the days when we used them exclusively to give us an rough count of our pedometer reading. Currently, they can measure our sleep quality, blood pressure, glucose levels, our recovery score.

It's a challenge to find a bodily function they aren't designed to measure.

But are they able to do what they say they do? And are the statistics we scrutinise a faithful picture of reality? Do they improve our daily wellness, or do the avalanche of readings and cheerleading alerts just add to our sense of overwhelm?

Addiction or Aid?

"I do get a a little fixated with mine," an individual confesses.

While she values how her device monitors her workouts, she finds some of its other functions "daunting" at times - a feeling initially realised during a significant period.

Before she realised she could put it into a specific mode, her smartwatch kept telling her she was failing to be energetic enough. In a new phase, the watch insists her she's had a bad night's sleep.

"I have a young baby, there's no point to be notified I'm tired," she says. "I'm acutely aware perfectly well."

Couldn't she just remove it?

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

How Do They Work?

Different brands of smartwatch has its own novel way of monitoring your health metrics and processing your data, but the most use detectors on the underside of the watch.

They typically project minute LED lights onto your wrist which can observe capillary action, identifying your BPM. Sophisticated devices analyse changes in the skin conductance that passes over the skin to get an idea of your recovery state.

Expert Perspectives

A data scientist says that for most people for smartwatches, it's a "fine balance" - while the rapidly advancing tech could potentially prevent illness, "spotting abnormalities before we show symptoms", it could also turn us device users into the "anxious healthy".

He points out that the most advanced wearables can carry out tests like medical-grade monitoring, which continuously monitor how normal the heart is. They can flag if someone is experiencing an irregular rhythm, where there is erratic signals in the heart causing an irregular heartbeat.

This does not necessarily indicate someone is about to have a heart attack, but it can give an advance notice they might be more at risk of a heart problem in the future.

But how to interpret these numbers is complicated. The expert fears that as more functions are added, people may not be able to fully contextualise their data.

"I'm not entirely convinced that the ability to monitor so much data is such a beneficial thing," he says.

A health researcher specialising in wearable tech concurs. A study into the effect of wearable tech on a specific group of individuals with health issues suggested a minority of those who were given devices to monitor their heart health experienced increased anxiety and were "had a higher tendency to use healthcare resources".

She noted a vicious circle with her patients - they saw a concerning reading on their watch. They became worried. Their BPM went up. They got increasingly anxious. They looked a second time, and their reading increased again.

"When people are presented with numbers about ourselves that we lack context for then, of course, we are going to become concerned," the psychologist says. "We check, we check again - it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy."