🔗 Share this article Am I Dependent on My Wearable Device? Many runners catch themselves monitoring their watches countless times in the middle of a competition. A sense of building tension. Apparent is the cold breath exhaled by my competitors as they do the "about to run" shuffle on the start line. A quick twitch of the hips. I'm at my local 5km community parkrun and I mean business. It's almost time... Oh, hang on. I need to start my watch. The same goes for the guy alongside me. The person behind us expresses impatience. I'm not moving until… yes! Signal acquired, I'm off. In the mele, it's challenging to see a wrist without a wearable on it. And this isn't only us participants who use them. We're witnessing a booming, massive sector. Brands like Apple Watch dominate, featuring an wide selection of different devices to cater to a range of budgets. According to how high tech the watch you select, price tags can range from £100 to a small fortune. "I find it infuriating, it's impossible to stop checking." "It provides solace… It acts as a companion guiding me." "I wish it wouldn't say I've experienced a restless night." A handful of the responses people have shared from fellow smartwatch wearers when I question what they think of theirs. Frequent wearers are often curious whether the metrics they're seeing is reliable. The Data Dilemma My feelings on mine? At this moment, irritating. It's reporting I'm not hitting my target, making me wonder whether the overhead branches I'm passing under are disrupting my GPS connection. Millions of us fasten these little devices onto our arms and wear them constantly, apparently comfortable with the fact they're constantly monitoring us. Gone are the days when we depended on them only to give us an idea of our daily steps. Currently, they can analyse our nightly rest, heart rate, oxygen saturation, our VO2 max. It's tricky to find a physical metric they fail to monitor. But are they able to do what they claim to do? And are the numbers we analyse a faithful picture of the truth? Do they enhance our mental and physical wellbeing, or do the avalanche of readings and cheerleading alerts just add to our daily stresses? Some users find the sheer number of functions on their smartwatches to be "too much" at times. A Love-Hate Relationship "I become a bit obsessed with mine," a wearer admits. While she loves how her device monitors her workouts, she finds some of its other features "excessive" at times - a feeling initially realised during a significant period. Until she found out she could change its configuration, her smartwatch kept telling her she was not being active enough. Now, the watch frequently reports her she's had a bad night's sleep. "I am caring for a young baby, I don't need to be told my sleep was poor," she says. "That fact is all too clearly." Couldn't she just stop wearing it? "I could, I suppose, but I have this push-pull dynamic with it," she says. "I appreciate it for its exercise data, I sometimes question whether all the other things it can now do is possibly too much for me." Inside the Device Each model of smartwatch has its own unique way of tracking your health metrics and analysing your data, but the majority use optical sensors on the back of the watch. They typically emit minute LED lights onto your skin which can detect capillary action, detecting your BPM. Sophisticated devices detect changes in the bioimpedance that passes over the skin to get an idea of your recovery state. A Fine Balance A data scientist says that overall for smartwatches, it's a "fine balance" - while the ever-evolving tech could actually save lives, "spotting abnormalities before we show symptoms", it could also turn us watch wearers into the "concerned but fine". He points out that the most advanced wearables can conduct tests like medical-grade monitoring, which regularly monitor how healthy 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 mean someone is on the verge of a cardiac event, but it can give an early warning they might be more at risk of a heart problem in the years to come. But how to interpret these figures is not straightforward. The expert fears that as additional features are incorporated, people may struggle to fully comprehend their data. "I have some doubts that the ability to monitor so many things is such a beneficial thing," he says. A professor studying wearable tech echoes this sentiment. Her work into the effect of wearable tech on a cohort of heart condition patients suggested a significant portion of those who were given devices to monitor their condition experienced heightened worry and were "had a higher tendency to use doctor's time". She identified a cycle with her patients - they saw a worrying figure on their watch. They felt anxious. Their heart rate rose. They got increasingly anxious. They looked a second time, and their reading increased again. "If we see stats about ourselves that we lack context for then, naturally, we are going to want to know more," the psychologist says. "We check, we obsess - it becomes a feedback loop."