🔗 Share this article Could I Be Dependent on My Smartwatch? Many runners find themselves monitoring their watches countless times in the middle of a race. A sense of nervous excitement. Apparent is the frosty air coming from my rivals as they do the "about to run" wiggle on the beginning point. A rapid flick of the hips. I'm lined up for my local 5km community parkrun and I mean business. The countdown begins... Hold on. I have to sort my watch. As does the runner alongside me. The person waiting sighs. I refuse to go until… yes! Connection established, and I'm running. Amidst the crowd, it's challenging to find a person without a smartwatch on it. And it's not just us participants who rely on them. We're witnessing a thriving, multi-billion dollar market. Names like Samsung Galaxy are prevalent, each with an broad selection of different versions to cater to a variety of budgets. Depending on how high tech the model you select, prices can start from an affordable sum to thousands of pounds. "I find it infuriating, it's impossible to stop checking." "It comforts me… It acts as a friend encouraging me." "I wish it wouldn't say I've experienced a bad night's sleep." Just some of the responses people have shared from fellow tracker enthusiasts when I ask what they feel about theirs. Individuals are left wondering whether the information on their watch is correct. The Monitoring Conundrum My feelings on my own device? Currently, annoying. It's telling me I'm not hitting my target, causing me to question whether the trees I'm running below are blocking my location tracking. Millions of us attach these little monitors onto our wrists and wear them all day and night, apparently comfortable with the fact they're perpetually monitoring us. Gone are the days when we depended on them exclusively to give us an rough count of our pedometer reading. Now, they can analyse our sleep patterns, stress levels, oxygen saturation, our VO2 max. It's difficult to find a bodily function they don't track. But can they do what they say they do? And are the statistics we obsess over a true reflection of the truth? Do they improve our daily wellness, or do the multitude of measurements and cheerleading alerts just add to our everyday anxiety? Some users find the multitude of functions on their smartwatches to be "excessive" at times. A Complicated Bond "I find myself getting a bit preoccupied with mine," one user reveals. While she loves how her device monitors her runs, she finds some of its other capabilities "excessive" at times - a feeling initially realised during a pregnancy. Prior to discovering she could put it into a specific mode, her smartwatch repeatedly informed her she was not being energetic enough. Now, the watch keeps telling her she's had a restless night. "I've got a six-month old, it's unnecessary for me to be told I've not slept," she says. "That fact is perfectly well." Is it not possible to just stop wearing it? "I suppose I could, I suppose, but I've got this love-hate relationship with it," she explains. "I appreciate it for its workout tracking, I sometimes question whether the myriad other functions it can now do is maybe overkill for me." The Technology Behind the Tracking Different brands of smartwatch has its own unique way of measuring your vitals and interpreting your data, but the most use detectors on the underside of the watch. They commonly shine minute LED lights onto your arm which can monitor pulsation, recording your pulse rate. More advanced devices detect changes in the skin conductance that passes over the skin to assess your recovery state. The Professional Viewpoint A data scientist says that in general for smartwatches, it's a "fine balance" - while the rapidly advancing tech could actually prevent illness, "spotting abnormalities before we feel unwell", it could also turn us device users into the "worried well". He points out that some of the latest wearables can perform tests like electrocardiograms (ECGs), which continuously monitor how stable the heart is. They can flag if someone is experiencing atrial fibrillation (AF), where there is abnormal signals in the heart causing an arrhythmia. This does not necessarily indicate someone is on the verge of a cardiac event, but it can give an preliminary indication they might be more vulnerable of a stroke in the long term. But how to understand these figures is complex. The expert worries that as more functions are added, people may struggle to fully contextualise their data. "I'm not entirely convinced that having the capacity to monitor so many metrics is such a good idea," he says. A clinical psychologist studying cardiology agrees. Her work 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 heart health experienced heightened worry and were "more inclined to use medical services". She observed a pattern with her patients - they saw a alarming metric on their watch. They grew concerned. Their BPM increased. They got more worried. They looked a second time, and their anxiety increased again. "Upon viewing stats about ourselves that we lack context for then, understandably, we are going to seek clarification," the psychologist says. "We monitor, we check again - it becomes a feedback loop."