🔗 Share this article

A sense of building tension. Visible is the frosty air emanating from my rivals as they do the "starting line" shuffle on the beginning point.

A quick flick of the hips.

I'm lined up for my local Saturday morning race and I'm serious. The countdown begins...

Oh, hang on. I have to adjust my watch. As does the runner beside me.

The person waiting expresses impatience. I won't start until… done! Signal acquired, I'm off.

In the mele, it's challenging to spot a wrist without a smartwatch on it. And this extends beyond us athletes who rely on them.

This is a thriving, multi-billion dollar market. Names like Garmin are prevalent, all offering an wide selection of different devices to fit a spectrum of lifestyles. According to how feature-packed the device you go for, price tags can range from £100 to thousands of pounds.

"I find it infuriating, I'm unable to stop checking."

"It reassures me… It feels like a companion encouraging me."

"Please don't notify me I've experienced a bad night's sleep."

A handful of the comments I've received from fellow tracker enthusiasts when I ask what they their opinion is on theirs.

A Sea of Statistics

My feelings on mine? Right now, irritating. It's indicating I'm not hitting my target, causing me to question whether the foliage along my route are disrupting my GPS connection.

A vast number of us attach these compact monitors onto our wrists and use them all day and night, ostensibly at ease with the fact they're constantly monitoring us.

Long past are the days when we relied on them only to give us an estimation of our step count. Today, they can track our sleep quality, stress levels, glucose levels, our VO2 max.

It's tricky to find a bodily function they aren't designed to measure.

But are they able to do what they say they do? And are the numbers we obsess over a true reflection of our actual health? Do they enhance our daily wellness, or do the plethora of measurements and constant notifications just contribute to our everyday anxiety?

A Love-Hate Relationship

"I do get a quite preoccupied with mine," one user admits.

While she values how her device records her workouts, she finds some of its other capabilities "excessive" at times - a feeling first discovered during a major life event.

Until she found out she could put it into a specific mode, her smartwatch constantly alerted her she was being insufficiently active enough. Now, the watch keeps telling her she's had a restless night.

"I've got a six-month old, there's no point to be told I'm tired," she says. "I know that perfectly well."

Couldn't she just stop wearing it?

"I could, I suppose, but I have this complicated dynamic with it," she says. "I value it for its fitness insights, I just wonder whether all the other things it can now do is possibly overkill for me."

The Technology Behind the Tracking

Each model of smartwatch has its own proprietary way of monitoring your health metrics and analysing your data, but the most use detectors on the underside of the watch.

They typically emit minute LED lights onto your wrist which can observe capillary action, identifying your BPM. More advanced devices detect changes in the electrical current that runs through the skin to gauge your recovery state.

A Fine Balance

A professor says that overall for smartwatches, it's a "delicate equilibrium" - while the continuously improving tech could actually prevent illness, "spotting abnormalities before we notice anything", it could also turn us the tracked into the "concerned but fine".

He points out that newer wearables can perform tests like electrocardiograms (ECGs), which continuously monitor how stable the heart is. They can flag if someone is experiencing a heart arrhythmia, where there is erratic signals in the heart causing an uneven pulse.

This does not mean someone is imminently going to suffer a cardiac event, but it can give an advance notice they might be more vulnerable of a heart problem in the future.

But how to interpret these figures is complex. The expert concerns that as additional features are added, people may find it hard to fully contextualise their data.

"I remain sceptical that having the capacity to monitor so much data is such a good idea," he says.

A health researcher focusing on wearable tech concurs. Her work into the impact of wearable tech on a set of heart condition patients suggested a noticeable percentage of those who were given devices to monitor their cardiac function experienced heightened worry and were "had a higher tendency to use medical services".

She observed a vicious circle with her patients - they spotted a concerning reading on their watch. They felt anxious. Their heart rate went up. They got increasingly anxious. They checked again, and their anxiety increased again.

"When people are presented with stats about ourselves that we lack context for then, of course, we are going to seek clarification," the psychologist says. "We look, we obsess - it becomes a feedback loop."