🔗 Share this article

There's a nervous excitement. Visible is the frosty air coming from my rivals as they do the "starting line" wiggle on the start line.

A swift movement of the hips.

I'm participating in my local 5km community parkrun and I'm serious. The countdown begins...

Wait a second. I have to adjust my device. The same goes for the person next to me.

The person in the line expresses impatience. I'm not moving until… yes! GPS ready, I'm off.

In the mele, it's challenging to see a person without a fitness tracker on it. And this extends beyond us runners who wear them.

It's a booming, multi-billion pound sector. Names like Garmin dominate, all offering an extensive selection of diverse devices to cater to a spectrum of lifestyles. According to how advanced the watch you select, prices can vary between an affordable sum to a small fortune.

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

"It comforts me… It acts as a friend supporting me."

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

A handful of the comments people have shared from fellow smartwatch wearers when I inquire what they their opinion is on theirs.

The Monitoring Conundrum

My thoughts on mine? Right now, annoying. It's reporting I'm off pace, leading me to doubt whether the trees along my route are disrupting my GPS connection.

Millions of us strap these little monitors onto our arms and wear them 24/7, ostensibly unconcerned with the fact they're constantly tracking us.

A distant memory are the days when we relied on them exclusively to give us an estimation of our pedometer reading. Currently, they can track our sleep patterns, stress levels, oxygen saturation, our recovery score.

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 scrutinise a faithful picture of our actual health? Do they enhance our daily wellness, or do the avalanche of measurements and constant notifications just add to our everyday anxiety?

Addiction or Aid?

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

While she loves how her device monitors her exercise, she finds some of its other features "daunting" 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 not being active enough. Later on, the watch keeps telling her she's had a restless night.

"I have a young baby, I don't need to be notified my sleep was poor," she says. "That fact is all too clearly."

Is it not possible to just take it off?

"I suppose I could, I suppose, but I have this push-pull dynamic with it," she explains. "I love it for its fitness insights, I just wonder whether the myriad other functions it can now do is possibly excessive for me."

Inside the Device

Different brands of smartwatch has its own unique way of monitoring your vitals and analysing your data, but the vast bulk use optical sensors on the reverse of the watch.

They typically shine tiny, coloured LED lights onto your skin which can detect capillary action, identifying your BPM. More advanced devices detect changes in the skin conductance that flows through the skin to assess your recovery state.

The Professional Viewpoint

One expert says that overall for smartwatches, it's a "delicate equilibrium" - while the ever-evolving tech could realistically prevent illness, "spotting abnormalities before we notice anything", it could also turn us watch wearers into the "anxious healthy".

He points out that newer wearables can carry out tests like electrocardiograms (ECGs), which continuously 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 uneven pulse.

This does not necessarily indicate someone is imminently going to suffer a heart attack, but it can give an early warning they might be more at risk of a blood clot in the future.

But how to make sense of these numbers is not straightforward. The expert concerns that as further capabilities are incorporated, people may find it hard to fully comprehend their data.

"I have some doubts that being able to monitor so many metrics is such a beneficial thing," he says.

A clinical psychologist studying wearable tech concurs. Her work into the effect of wearable tech on a cohort of individuals with health issues suggested a minority of those who were given devices to monitor their heart health experienced greater stress and were "more inclined to use doctor's time".

She observed a pattern with her patients - they saw a worrying figure on their watch. They became worried. Their heart rate went up. They got more worried. They looked a second time, and their heart rate rose further.

"Upon viewing data about ourselves that we don't really understand then, of course, we are going to want to know more," the psychologist says. "We monitor, we obsess - it becomes a vicious cycle."