🔗 Share this article

An atmosphere of building tension. I can see the cold breath exhaled by my competitors as they do the "about to run" jiggle on the beginning point.

A quick flick of the hips.

I'm at my local weekly parkrun event and I'm serious. It's almost time...

Wait a second. I must start my tracker. The same goes for the person alongside me.

The person waiting tuts. I won't start until… there! Connection established, and I'm running.

During the scramble, it's hard to spot a arm without a smartwatch on it. And this isn't only us runners who wear them.

It's a booming, multi-billion pound industry. Companies like Apple Watch lead the market, all offering an wide range of different devices to fit a spectrum of budgets. Based on how advanced the device you select, costs can range from £100 to thousands of pounds.

"It makes me crazy, I can't switch off."

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

"Stop telling me about a poor sleep."

A small sample of the reactions people have shared from fellow device users when I ask what they think of theirs.

The Monitoring Conundrum

My current opinion on mine? Right now, frustrating. It's telling me I'm off pace, causing me to question whether the overhead branches I'm running below are disrupting my location tracking.

Countless individuals of us attach these small monitors onto our arms and keep them on all day and night, apparently unconcerned with the fact they're perpetually tracking us.

A distant memory are the days when we used them exclusively to give us an rough count of our pedometer reading. Now, they can measure our nightly rest, heart rate, oxygen saturation, our VO2 max.

It's difficult to find a physical metric they don't track.

But can they do what they claim to do? And are the numbers we scrutinise a true reflection of the truth? Do they improve our daily wellness, or do the plethora of readings and constant notifications just add to our sense of overwhelm?

A Complicated Bond

"I become a quite obsessed with mine," an individual reveals.

While she loves how her device records her runs, she finds some of its other functions "overwhelming" at times - a feeling that became apparent during a significant period.

Until she found out she could change its configuration, her smartwatch constantly alerted her she was being insufficiently productive enough. In a new phase, the watch keeps telling her she's had a poor sleep score.

"I am caring for a young baby, there's no point to be told I'm tired," she says. "I know that only too well."

Why doesn't she just take it off?

"I suppose I could, I suppose, but I'm in this love-hate relationship with it," she explains. "I value it for its workout tracking, I just wonder whether all the other things it can now do is possibly too much for me."

How Do They Work?

Every device of smartwatch has its own proprietary way of tracking your health metrics and interpreting your data, but the vast bulk use sensors on the reverse of the watch.

They commonly shine tiny, coloured LED lights onto your wrist which can observe blood flow, detecting your BPM. Higher-end devices measure changes in the electrical current that passes over the skin to gauge your nervous system activity.

A Fine Balance

A data scientist says that for most people for smartwatches, it's a "fine balance" - while the ever-evolving tech could actually save lives, "detecting disease before we feel unwell", it could also turn us device users into the "concerned but fine".

He points out that the most advanced wearables can carry out tests like electrocardiograms (ECGs), which regularly monitor how healthy the heart is. They can alert if someone is experiencing atrial fibrillation (AF), where there is irregular impulses in the heart causing an irregular heartbeat.

This does not automatically signal someone is about to have a cardiac event, but it can give an early warning they might be more susceptible of a stroke in the future.

But how to make sense of these figures is complex. The expert fears that as more functions are added, people may not be able to fully contextualise their data.

"I'm not entirely convinced that the ability to monitor so many things is such a positive development," he says.

A professor focusing on cardiology concurs. Her work 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 "more inclined to use doctor's time".

She identified a vicious circle with her patients - they noticed a alarming metric on their watch. They felt anxious. Their heart rate rose. They got increasingly anxious. They looked a second time, and their anxiety increased again.

"Upon viewing numbers about ourselves that we don't really understand then, of course, we are going to become concerned," the psychologist says. "We monitor, we re-check - it becomes a feedback loop."