🔗 Share this article Is It Possible I'm Dependent on My Wearable Device? Numerous athletes catch themselves monitoring their watches innumerable times during a competition. There's a nervous excitement. Apparent is the frosty air exhaled by my rivals as they execute the "starting line" shuffle on the beginning point. A rapid flick of the hips. I'm participating in my local Saturday morning race and I'm focused. The countdown begins... Hold on. I have to sort my watch. The same goes for the person next to me. The person in the line expresses impatience. I refuse to go until… done! Signal acquired, I'm off. Amidst the crowd, it's hard to spot a person without a smartwatch on it. And it's not just us athletes who use them. This is a thriving, multi-billion pound sector. Companies like Garmin dominate, all offering an broad array of various versions to fit a variety of lifestyles. Depending on how advanced the watch you choose, costs can start from £100 to a small fortune. "It makes me crazy, it's impossible to stop checking." "It provides solace… It's like a companion guiding me." "I wish it wouldn't say about a bad night's sleep." A handful of the responses I've had from fellow smartwatch wearers when I inquire what they feel about theirs. Frequent wearers are left wondering whether the metrics on their watch is reliable. A Sea of Statistics My thoughts on mine? Right now, annoying. It's reporting my speed is wrong, causing me to question whether the overhead branches I'm running below are interfering with my satellite signal. A vast number of us fasten these compact monitors onto our arms and wear them constantly, seemingly unconcerned with the fact they're constantly tracking us. Gone are the days when we relied on them solely to give us an estimation of our step count. Today, they can measure our sleep patterns, stress levels, oxygen saturation, our recovery score. It's difficult to find a bodily function they aren't designed to measure. But can they do what they say they do? And are the statistics we analyse a faithful picture of the truth? Do they enhance our mental and physical wellbeing, or do the avalanche of metrics and cheerleading alerts just add to our sense of overwhelm? Some users find the multitude of functions on their smartwatches to be "too much" at times. A Love-Hate Relationship "I find myself getting a bit obsessed with mine," an individual admits. While she values how her device monitors her exercise, she finds some of its other functions "excessive" at times - a feeling initially realised during a pregnancy. Before she realised she could change its configuration, her smartwatch kept telling her she was being insufficiently active enough. Later on, the watch keeps telling her she's had a restless night. "I have a six-month old, there's no point to be informed my sleep was poor," she says. "That fact is all too clearly." Why doesn't she just remove it? "I suppose I could, I suppose, but I've got this push-pull dynamic with it," she says. "I value it for its workout tracking, but I'm unsure whether the myriad other functions it can now do is perhaps excessive for me." The Technology Behind the Tracking Different brands of smartwatch has its own unique way of tracking your health metrics and interpreting your data, but the majority use optical sensors on the underside of the watch. They commonly project tiny, coloured LED lights onto your skin which can detect capillary action, recording your BPM. Sophisticated devices detect changes in the electrical current that flows through the skin to assess your nervous system activity. A Fine Balance A data scientist says that overall for smartwatches, it's a "difficult line" - while the continuously improving tech could realistically aid early diagnosis, "identifying issues before we show symptoms", it could also turn us watch wearers into the "concerned but fine". He points out that newer wearables can carry out tests like medical-grade monitoring, which constantly monitor how normal the heart is. They can alert if someone is experiencing atrial fibrillation (AF), where there is irregular electrical activity in the heart causing an arrhythmia. This does not automatically signal someone is about to have a heart attack, but it can give an early warning they might be more susceptible of a stroke in the long term. But how to interpret these numbers is not straightforward. The expert worries that as additional features are added, people may not be able to fully comprehend their data. "I remain sceptical that having the capacity to monitor so many things is such a positive development," he says. A clinical psychologist specialising in wearable tech agrees. Her work into the impact of wearable tech on a set of individuals with health issues suggested a significant portion of those who were given devices to monitor their cardiac function experienced greater stress and were "more inclined to use doctor's time". She observed a pattern with her patients - they noticed a alarming metric on their watch. They grew concerned. Their BPM went up. They got even more concerned. They checked again, and their reading went up again. "When people are presented with numbers about ourselves that we don't really understand then, naturally, we are going to become concerned," the psychologist says. "We look, we re-check - it becomes a vicious cycle."