Could I Be Hooked on My Smartwatch?
A sense of building tension. Apparent is the frosty air exhaled by my competitors as they do the "starting line" shuffle on the beginning point.
A quick flick of the hips.
I'm at my local 5km community parkrun and I mean business. Three, two, one...
Wait a second. I have to start my tracker. So does the person next to me.
The person in the line tuts. I'm not moving until… yes! Signal acquired, I'm off.
During the scramble, it's challenging to find a wrist without a wearable on it. And it's not just us runners who wear them.
It's a explosive, multi-billion dollar industry. Names like Garmin are prevalent, each with an extensive array of diverse versions to suit a variety of needs. According to how advanced the model you go for, price tags can start from £100 to a small fortune.
"It makes me crazy, it's impossible to relax."
"It provides solace… It acts as a supporter encouraging me."
"I wish it wouldn't say about a bad night's sleep."
A handful of the responses people have shared from like-minded smartwatch wearers when I ask what they their opinion is on theirs.
A Sea of Statistics
My thoughts on mine? At this moment, annoying. It's indicating I'm off pace, making me wonder whether the overhead branches along my route are blocking my satellite signal.
Millions of us fasten these compact gadgets onto our wrists and keep them on constantly, ostensibly at ease with the fact they're continuously monitoring us.
A distant memory are the days when we used them exclusively to give us an rough count of our step count. Today, they can track our sleep patterns, stress levels, glucose levels, our body battery.
It's difficult to find a physical metric they fail to monitor.
But do they do what they say they do? And are the data points we obsess over a accurate representation of reality? Do they boost our daily wellness, or do the plethora of readings and cheerleading alerts just contribute to our daily stresses?
A Love-Hate Relationship
"I become a bit preoccupied with mine," a wearer confesses.
While she values how her device tracks her exercise, she finds some of its other functions "excessive" at times - a feeling initially realised during a significant period.
Before she realised she could put it into a specific mode, her smartwatch repeatedly informed her she was not being energetic enough. Later on, the watch frequently reports her she's had a restless night.
"I am caring for a young baby, I don't need to be informed I've not slept," she says. "I'm acutely aware all too clearly."
Couldn't she just stop wearing it?
"It's possible, perhaps, but I have this love-hate relationship with it," she continues. "I value it for its exercise data, I just wonder whether all the other things it can now do is maybe overkill for me."
The Technology Behind the Tracking
Different brands of smartwatch has its own unique way of tracking your health metrics and analysing your data, but the most use detectors on the underside of the watch.
They usually emit small, green LED lights onto your wrist which can observe blood flow, identifying your BPM. Sophisticated devices detect changes in the bioimpedance that passes over the skin to get an idea of your nervous system activity.
A Fine Balance
A professor says that in general for smartwatches, it's a "fine balance" - while the rapidly advancing tech could potentially save lives, "identifying issues before we feel unwell", 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 continuously monitor how normal the heart is. They can flag if someone is experiencing atrial fibrillation (AF), where there is erratic signals in the heart causing an irregular heartbeat.
This does not necessarily indicate someone is about to have a cardiac event, but it can give an advance notice they might be more susceptible of a heart problem in the future.
But how to make sense of these readings is complicated. The expert concerns that as further capabilities are incorporated, people may struggle to fully understand their data.
"I have some doubts that being able to monitor so much data is such a good idea," he says.
A clinical psychologist studying patient behaviour agrees. A study into the impact of wearable tech on a specific group of individuals with health issues suggested a significant portion of those who were given devices to monitor their heart health experienced heightened worry and were "more inclined to use doctor's time".
She noted a pattern with her patients - they saw a worrying figure on their watch. They grew concerned. Their pulse increased. They got increasingly anxious. They re-examined the data, and their reading went up again.
"When people are presented with stats 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."
