🔗 Share this article Could I Be Hooked on My Smartwatch? Numerous athletes end up consulting their watches innumerable times throughout a event. There's a building tension. Visible is the cold breath exhaled by my rivals as they do the "about to run" jiggle on the start line. A swift flick of the hips. I'm participating in my local 5km community parkrun and I mean business. Three, two, one... Oh, hang on. I must start my device. As does the guy beside me. The person in the line sighs. I refuse to go until… there! Signal acquired, and I'm running. In the mele, it's challenging to see a arm without a smartwatch on it. And it's not just us athletes who wear them. This is a explosive, multi-billion pound sector. Names like Apple Watch are prevalent, all offering an wide array of diverse models to suit a spectrum of lifestyles. Based on how advanced the model you go for, costs can vary between an affordable sum to a small fortune. "It drives me insane, I can't switch off." "It provides solace… It feels like a companion encouraging me." "Please don't notify me about a poor sleep." A handful of the comments I've received from other device users when I ask what they think of theirs. Frequent wearers are frequently questioning whether the data their device provides is correct. A Sea of Statistics My current opinion on my own device? Currently, annoying. It's reporting my speed is wrong, leading me to doubt whether the trees along my route are disrupting my satellite signal. A vast number of us strap these small monitors onto our wrists and use them all day and night, ostensibly comfortable with the fact they're continuously tracking us. Gone are the days when we depended on them exclusively to give us an idea of our step count. Currently, they can track our nightly rest, blood pressure, oxygen saturation, our recovery score. It's tricky to find a physical metric they fail to monitor. But are they able to do what they advertise? And are the numbers we scrutinise a faithful picture of our actual health? Do they boost our mental and physical wellbeing, or do the avalanche of readings and motivational messages just contribute to our sense of overwhelm? Some users find the abundance of functions on their smartwatches to be "overwhelming" at times. A Complicated Bond "I become a bit fixated with mine," an individual admits. While she values how her device monitors her runs, she finds some of its other capabilities "daunting" at times - a feeling first discovered during a significant period. Until she found out she could put it into a specific mode, her smartwatch constantly alerted her she was not being active enough. Now, the watch keeps telling her she's had a restless night. "I have a infant, it's unnecessary for me to be informed I've not slept," she says. "I'm acutely aware only too well." Why doesn't she just remove it? "It's possible, I suppose, but I'm in this complicated dynamic with it," she says. "I appreciate it for its workout tracking, I just wonder whether all the other things it can now do is possibly overkill for me." How Do They Work? Every device of smartwatch has its own proprietary way of tracking your vitals and analysing your data, but the vast bulk use optical sensors on the reverse of the watch. They typically project tiny, coloured LED lights onto your arm which can observe pulsation, recording your BPM. More advanced devices detect changes in the skin conductance that runs through the skin to get an idea of your recovery state. The Professional Viewpoint A professor says that overall for smartwatches, it's a "difficult line" - while the continuously improving tech could potentially prevent illness, "spotting abnormalities before we notice anything", it could also turn us device users into the "anxious healthy". He points out that some of the latest wearables can conduct tests like medical-grade monitoring, which constantly monitor how stable the heart is. They can flag if someone is experiencing an irregular rhythm, where there is abnormal electrical activity 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 years to come. But how to interpret these figures is complicated. The expert concerns that as further capabilities are introduced, people may struggle to fully comprehend their data. "I have some doubts that the ability to monitor so many metrics is such a beneficial thing," he says. A professor specialising in patient behaviour agrees. Research into the impact of wearable tech on a specific group of heart condition patients suggested a significant portion of those who were given devices to monitor their cardiac function experienced heightened worry and were "far more likely to use medical services". She noted a cycle with her patients - they spotted a alarming metric on their watch. They grew concerned. Their heart rate rose. They got more worried. They re-examined the data, and their reading increased again. "Upon viewing numbers about ourselves that we lack context for then, naturally, we are going to want to know more," the psychologist says. "We monitor, we check again - it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy."