🔗 Share this article

A sense of nervous excitement. Visible is the chilled vapour exhaled by my rivals as they execute the "starting line" jiggle on the starting line.

A quick twitch of the hips.

I'm participating in my local weekly parkrun event and I'm serious. The countdown begins...

Hold on. I must sort my watch. So does the runner beside me.

The person behind us sighs. I won't start until… done! Signal acquired, I'm off.

During the scramble, it's hard to see a person without a fitness tracker on it. And this extends beyond us participants who rely on them.

It's a booming, multi-billion dollar sector. Brands like Garmin are prevalent, each with an extensive array of diverse versions to fit a spectrum of lifestyles. According to how advanced the model you choose, price tags can range from an affordable sum to a small fortune.

"It drives me insane, I'm unable to switch off."

"It comforts me… It feels like a friend guiding me."

"Stop telling me I've experienced a bad night's sleep."

Just some of the responses I've received from fellow device users when I question what they their opinion is on theirs.

The Data Dilemma

My feelings on my own device? Right now, annoying. It's telling me I'm off pace, causing me to question whether the foliage I'm running below are disrupting my satellite signal.

Millions of us fasten these compact gadgets onto our wrists and keep them on constantly, seemingly comfortable with the fact they're continuously monitoring us.

Gone are the days when we relied on them only to give us an rough count of our pedometer reading. Currently, they can track our nightly rest, stress levels, oxygen saturation, our VO2 max.

It's a challenge to find a physical metric they fail to monitor.

But do they do what they advertise? And are the statistics we obsess over a accurate representation of our actual health? Do they improve our overall health, or do the plethora of measurements and cheerleading alerts just increase our daily stresses?

Addiction or Aid?

"I become a quite fixated with mine," one user reveals.

While she values how her device monitors her runs, she finds some of its other capabilities "overwhelming" at times - a feeling initially realised during a significant period.

Before she realised she could adjust the settings, her smartwatch repeatedly informed her she was being insufficiently active enough. Now, the watch keeps telling her she's had a poor sleep score.

"I am caring for a six-month old, it's unnecessary for me to be notified my sleep was poor," she says. "I know that all too clearly."

Is it not possible to just remove it?

"I could, I suppose, but I'm in this love-hate relationship with it," she says. "I appreciate it for its workout tracking, I just wonder whether the myriad other functions it can now do is perhaps too much for me."

The Technology Behind the Tracking

Every device of smartwatch has its own proprietary way of measuring your bodily functions and processing your data, but the most use sensors on the back of the watch.

They commonly shine tiny, coloured LED lights onto your arm which can observe capillary action, detecting your BPM. Sophisticated devices detect changes in the electrical current that flows through the skin to gauge your stress levels.

A Fine Balance

A professor says that for most people for smartwatches, it's a "delicate equilibrium" - while the rapidly advancing tech could actually save lives, "detecting disease before we notice anything", it could also turn us device users into the "worried well".

He points out that some of the latest wearables can conduct tests like heart rhythm analysis, which regularly monitor how normal the heart is. They can notify if someone is experiencing a heart arrhythmia, where there is irregular signals in the heart causing an arrhythmia.

This does not automatically signal someone is imminently going to suffer a heart attack, but it can give an advance notice they might be more at risk of a blood clot in the years to come.

But how to make sense of these readings is complex. The expert fears that as more functions are incorporated, people may find it hard to fully understand their data.

"I have some doubts that the ability to monitor so much data is such a positive development," he says.

A clinical psychologist studying wearable tech concurs. Research into the influence of wearable tech on a set of individuals with health issues suggested a significant portion of those who were given devices to monitor their heart health experienced greater stress and were "far more likely to use medical services".

She noted a pattern with her patients - they saw a worrying figure on their watch. They became worried. Their heart rate increased. They got increasingly anxious. They looked a second time, and their heart rate increased again.

"When people are presented with numbers about ourselves that we don't really understand then, of course, we are going to seek clarification," the psychologist says. "We monitor, we obsess - it becomes a vicious cycle."