🔗 Share this article

An atmosphere of feeling of anticipation. I can see the chilled vapour coming from my rivals as they do the "about to run" shuffle on the beginning point.

A quick movement of the hips.

I'm lined up for my local Saturday morning race and I mean business. It's almost time...

Hold on. I need to adjust my device. The same goes for the person next to me.

The person waiting expresses impatience. I refuse to go until… done! Signal acquired, I'm off.

Amidst the crowd, it's hard to see a person without a smartwatch on it. And it's not just us athletes who use them.

This is a thriving, multi-billion pound market. Brands like Garmin lead the market, all offering an extensive selection of various models to suit a variety of needs. Depending on how feature-packed the device you select, costs can vary between a hundred pounds to a small fortune.

"It drives me insane, I can't switch off."

"It provides solace… It feels like a friend guiding me."

"Stop telling me I've experienced a poor sleep."

A handful of the responses I've had from other tracker enthusiasts when I ask what they their opinion is on theirs.

A Sea of Statistics

My feelings on my own device? At this moment, annoying. It's telling me my speed is wrong, leading me to doubt whether the foliage I'm running below are disrupting my location tracking.

Countless individuals of us fasten these small gadgets onto our arms and keep them on constantly, ostensibly comfortable with the fact they're perpetually tracking us.

A distant memory are the days when we used them only to give us an rough count of our daily steps. Today, they can measure our sleep patterns, stress levels, glucose levels, our body battery.

It's difficult to find a physical metric they don't track.

But are they able to do what they advertise? And are the numbers we obsess over a accurate representation of reality? Do they improve our mental and physical wellbeing, or do the multitude of readings and motivational messages just add to our sense of overwhelm?

A Love-Hate Relationship

"I do get a a little obsessed with mine," a wearer admits.

While she values how her device monitors her exercise, she finds some of its other features "overwhelming" at times - a feeling initially realised during a significant period.

Prior to discovering she could put it into a specific mode, her smartwatch kept telling her she was not being energetic enough. Now, the watch insists her she's had a bad night's sleep.

"I am caring for a young baby, there's no point to be told I've not slept," she says. "I'm acutely aware all too clearly."

Couldn't she just stop wearing it?

"It's possible, I suppose, but I've got this complicated dynamic with it," she explains. "I love it for its exercise data, I just wonder whether the myriad other functions it can now do is perhaps overkill for me."

The Technology Behind the Tracking

Different brands of smartwatch has its own proprietary way of measuring your health metrics and analysing your data, but the majority use sensors on the back of the watch.

They typically project minute LED lights onto your arm which can monitor capillary action, detecting your pulse rate. More advanced devices detect changes in the skin conductance that passes over the skin to gauge your nervous system activity.

A Fine Balance

A data scientist says that for most people for smartwatches, it's a "difficult line" - while the rapidly advancing tech could potentially save lives, "detecting disease before we feel unwell", it could also turn us watch wearers into the "worried well".

He points out that newer wearables can conduct 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 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 future.

But how to understand these figures is complex. The expert worries that as further capabilities are added, people may find it hard to fully comprehend their data.

"I'm not entirely convinced that being able to monitor so much data is such a positive development," he says.

A health researcher specialising in wearable tech agrees. Her work into the influence of wearable tech on a set 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 healthcare resources".

She identified a pattern with her patients - they noticed a alarming metric on their watch. They grew concerned. Their heart rate increased. They got more worried. They looked a second time, and their reading went up again.

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