🔗 Share this article Is It Possible I'm Dependent on My Wearable Device? Many runners find themselves consulting their devices numerous times during a competition. A sense of nervous excitement. I can see the chilled vapour exhaled by my rivals as they do the "pre-race" wiggle on the start line. A rapid twitch of the hips. I'm lined up for my local weekly parkrun event and I'm serious. It's almost time... Oh, hang on. I have to adjust my tracker. As does the guy beside me. The person in the line expresses impatience. I won't start until… there! GPS ready, and I'm running. Amidst the crowd, it's challenging to see a arm without a smartwatch on it. And this isn't only us participants who wear them. It's a booming, multi-billion pound industry. Names like Apple Watch are prevalent, featuring an wide range of various models to cater to a variety of lifestyles. Depending on how high tech the watch you select, price tags can start from £100 to a small fortune. "I find it infuriating, it's impossible to stop checking." "It reassures me… It acts as a friend encouraging me." "Stop telling me I've had a restless night." A small sample of the responses people have shared from like-minded tracker enthusiasts when I inquire what they feel about theirs. Frequent wearers are frequently questioning whether the metrics they're seeing is accurate. The Monitoring Conundrum My thoughts on my own device? At this moment, annoying. It's reporting I'm off pace, causing me to question whether the overhead branches I'm passing under are blocking my satellite signal. Countless individuals of us fasten these little gadgets onto our wrists and keep them on all day and night, apparently at ease with the fact they're continuously recording us. Long past are the days when we depended on them only to give us an rough count of our step count. Today, they can track our sleep quality, blood pressure, heart rate variability (HRV), our VO2 max. It's tricky to find a health indicator they don't track. But can they do what they say they do? And are the numbers we scrutinise a true reflection of the truth? Do they enhance our daily wellness, or do the multitude of readings and motivational messages just contribute to our everyday anxiety? Some users find the multitude of functions on their smartwatches to be "excessive" at times. A Love-Hate Relationship "I do get a quite preoccupied with mine," an individual reveals. While she appreciates how her device tracks her exercise, she finds some of its other features "overwhelming" at times - a feeling that became apparent during a pregnancy. Prior to discovering she could change its configuration, her smartwatch constantly alerted her she was failing to be active enough. Later on, the watch insists her she's had a bad night's sleep. "I've got a infant, there's no point to be notified my sleep was poor," she says. "I'm acutely aware perfectly well." Couldn't she just remove it? "I could, I suppose, but I have this push-pull dynamic with it," she explains. "I value it for its exercise data, but I'm unsure whether the additional features it can now do is possibly excessive for me." Inside the Device Each model of smartwatch has its own novel way of monitoring your vitals and analysing your data, but the majority use detectors on the back of the watch. They usually shine small, green LED lights onto your arm which can observe blood flow, detecting your heartbeat. Sophisticated devices measure changes in the electrical current that passes over the skin to get an idea of your nervous system activity. Expert Perspectives A data scientist says that overall for smartwatches, it's a "difficult line" - while the ever-evolving tech could potentially prevent illness, "identifying issues before we feel unwell", it could also turn us device users into the "concerned but fine". He points out that some of the latest wearables can conduct tests like heart rhythm analysis, which regularly monitor how stable the heart is. They can flag if someone is experiencing an irregular rhythm, where there is abnormal impulses in the heart causing an irregular heartbeat. This does not necessarily indicate someone is imminently going to suffer a heart attack, but it can give an advance notice they might be more vulnerable of a stroke in the long term. But how to understand these numbers is complicated. The expert fears that as further capabilities are introduced, people may not be able to fully understand their data. "I have some doubts that being able to monitor so much data is such a beneficial thing," he says. A clinical psychologist studying patient behaviour echoes this sentiment. Her work into the impact of wearable tech on a cohort of cardiovascular patients suggested a minority of those who were given devices to monitor their condition experienced greater stress and were "had a higher tendency to use doctor's time". She observed a cycle with her patients - they noticed a worrying figure on their watch. They grew concerned. Their pulse went up. They got even more concerned. They re-examined the data, and their reading increased again. "If we see data about ourselves that we can't properly interpret then, naturally, we are going to become concerned," the psychologist says. "We monitor, we re-check - it becomes a feedback loop."