🔗 Share this article Am I Hooked on This Fitness Tracker? Numerous athletes catch themselves monitoring their devices innumerable times throughout a race. An atmosphere of nervous excitement. Apparent is the frosty air exhaled by my rivals as they do the "pre-race" shuffle on the beginning point. A rapid movement of the hips. I'm participating in my local 5km community parkrun and I mean business. The countdown begins... Wait a second. I have to start my device. As does the person next to me. The person behind us tuts. I won't start until… done! Connection established, and I'm running. Amidst the crowd, it's difficult to see a person without a smartwatch on it. And it's not just us participants who use them. This is a booming, multi-billion pound market. Names like Apple Watch dominate, featuring an extensive selection of various devices to cater to a variety of needs. According to how advanced the model you go for, prices can start from £100 to thousands of pounds. "It makes me crazy, I can't relax." "It comforts me… It feels like a companion encouraging me." "Please don't notify me I've experienced a poor sleep." Just some of the comments I've had from fellow tracker enthusiasts when I question what they think of theirs. Individuals are left wondering whether the metrics they're seeing is correct. The Monitoring Conundrum My feelings on mine? Currently, annoying. It's indicating I'm off pace, causing me to question whether the overhead branches along my route are disrupting my location tracking. A vast number of us fasten these little gadgets onto our arms and keep them on constantly, ostensibly unconcerned with the fact they're constantly monitoring us. A distant memory are the days when we depended on them only to give us an rough count of our pedometer reading. Now, they can track our sleep patterns, stress levels, oxygen saturation, our body battery. It's tricky to find a physical metric they aren't designed to measure. But are they able to do what they claim to do? And are the data points we analyse a true reflection of reality? Do they boost our overall health, or do the multitude of readings and motivational messages 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 do get a quite fixated with mine," a wearer confesses. While she loves how her device monitors her workouts, she finds some of its other functions "overwhelming" at times - a feeling first discovered during a pregnancy. Prior to discovering she could adjust the settings, her smartwatch repeatedly informed her she was being insufficiently energetic enough. Now, the watch frequently reports her she's had a bad night's sleep. "I have a young baby, it's unnecessary for me to be told I've not slept," she says. "That fact is all too clearly." Why doesn't she just take it off? "I suppose I could, perhaps, but I have this love-hate relationship with it," she continues. "I love it for its exercise data, I sometimes question whether the additional features it can now do is possibly overkill for me." Inside the Device Every device of smartwatch has its own unique way of measuring your bodily functions and analysing your data, but the most use sensors on the back of the watch. They commonly shine tiny, coloured LED lights onto your skin which can detect pulsation, recording your heartbeat. Higher-end devices measure changes in the skin conductance that runs through the skin to assess your nervous system activity. The Professional Viewpoint A professor says that in general for smartwatches, it's a "delicate equilibrium" - while the rapidly advancing tech could realistically save lives, "identifying issues before we show symptoms", it could also turn us device users into the "concerned but fine". He points out that newer wearables can conduct tests like heart rhythm analysis, which regularly monitor how normal the heart is. They can notify if someone is experiencing atrial fibrillation (AF), where there is erratic impulses in the heart causing an uneven pulse. This does not automatically signal someone is imminently going to suffer a cardiac event, but it can give an early warning they might be more vulnerable of a blood clot in the years to come. But how to make sense of these figures is complex. The expert fears that as further capabilities are introduced, people may struggle to fully comprehend their data. "I'm not entirely convinced that having the capacity to monitor so many things is such a good idea," he says. A clinical psychologist focusing on wearable tech echoes this sentiment. Research into the effect of wearable tech on a set of individuals with health issues suggested a noticeable percentage of those who were given devices to monitor their heart health experienced greater stress and were "more inclined to use healthcare resources". She noted a vicious circle with her patients - they noticed a alarming metric on their watch. They felt anxious. Their BPM increased. They got even more concerned. They looked a second time, and their heart rate went up again. "When people are presented with numbers about ourselves that we don't really understand then, understandably, we are going to become concerned," the psychologist says. "We check, we check again - it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy."