🔗 Share this article

A sense of nervous excitement. Visible is the cold breath coming from my rivals as they perform the "pre-race" jiggle on the beginning point.

A quick twitch of the hips.

I'm participating in my local weekly parkrun event and I mean business. Three, two, one...

Oh, hang on. I must sort my tracker. The same goes for the runner alongside me.

The person waiting expresses impatience. I refuse to go until… yes! Signal acquired, and I'm running.

In the mele, it's difficult to see a person without a wearable on it. And this isn't only us athletes who use them.

This is a explosive, multi-billion dollar industry. Names like Garmin dominate, all offering an extensive array of diverse versions to cater to a range of lifestyles. Based on how advanced the device you go for, prices can vary between a hundred pounds to a significant investment.

"It drives me insane, I'm unable to relax."

"It comforts me… It's like a companion supporting me."

"Please don't notify me I've had a poor sleep."

Just some of the responses I've had from like-minded smartwatch wearers when I inquire what they feel about theirs.

A Sea of Statistics

My feelings on mine? Right now, annoying. It's indicating I'm not hitting my target, leading me to doubt whether the trees I'm passing under are blocking my location tracking.

A vast number of us fasten these compact gadgets onto our wrists and keep them on all day and night, seemingly comfortable with the fact they're perpetually monitoring us.

Gone are the days when we depended on them solely to give us an rough count of our step count. Currently, they can measure our nightly rest, blood pressure, glucose levels, our VO2 max.

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

But do they do what they advertise? And are the statistics we obsess over a accurate representation of reality? Do they boost our mental and physical wellbeing, or do the multitude of metrics and constant notifications just contribute to our daily stresses?

Addiction or Aid?

"I find myself getting a a little preoccupied with mine," one user confesses.

While she values how her device monitors her runs, she finds some of its other features "daunting" at times - a feeling that became apparent during a major life event.

Until she found out she could change its configuration, her smartwatch kept telling her she was failing to be energetic enough. Later on, the watch frequently reports her she's had a bad night's sleep.

"I've got a six-month old, it's unnecessary for me to be notified my sleep was poor," she says. "That fact is perfectly well."

Why doesn't she just take it off?

"It's possible, theoretically, but I've got this love-hate relationship with it," she explains. "I value it for its fitness insights, I sometimes question whether all the other things it can now do is perhaps overkill for me."

Inside the Device

Different brands of smartwatch has its own novel way of monitoring your bodily functions and processing your data, but the majority use detectors on the back of the watch.

They usually shine minute LED lights onto your wrist which can detect pulsation, recording your pulse rate. Higher-end devices detect changes in the skin conductance that flows through the skin to assess your nervous system activity.

The Professional Viewpoint

A data scientist says that overall for smartwatches, it's a "fine balance" - while the rapidly advancing tech could realistically prevent illness, "detecting disease before we notice anything", it could also turn us the tracked into the "concerned but fine".

He points out that newer 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 erratic electrical activity in the heart causing an irregular heartbeat.

This does not necessarily indicate someone is about to have a heart attack, but it can give an preliminary indication they might be more vulnerable of a heart problem in the future.

But how to make sense of these figures is complicated. The expert concerns that as more functions are introduced, people may struggle to fully understand their data.

"I remain sceptical that being able to monitor so many metrics is such a positive development," he says.

A clinical psychologist specialising in cardiology agrees. Research into the impact of wearable tech on a set of cardiovascular patients suggested a noticeable percentage of those who were given devices to monitor their condition experienced greater stress and were "had a higher tendency to use doctor's time".

She observed a pattern with her patients - they spotted a concerning reading on their watch. They felt anxious. Their pulse increased. They got more worried. They checked again, and their reading went up again.

"If we see stats about ourselves that we can't properly interpret then, naturally, we are going to want to know more," the psychologist says. "We check, we check again - it becomes a feedback loop."