Could I Be Hooked on This Fitness Tracker?
A sense of building tension. Visible is the chilled vapour exhaled by my rivals as they do the "starting line" jiggle on the starting line.
A quick movement of the hips.
I'm lined up for my local 5km community parkrun and I'm serious. It's almost time...
Wait a second. I have to sort my device. The same goes for the person alongside me.
The person waiting expresses impatience. I refuse to go until… done! Connection established, away I go.
In the mele, it's difficult to see a wrist without a fitness tracker on it. And it's not just us participants who use them.
This is a explosive, massive industry. Names like Samsung Galaxy dominate, all offering an broad selection of diverse devices to suit a variety of budgets. According to how high tech the model you select, price tags can range from a hundred pounds to a small fortune.
"I find it infuriating, I'm unable to relax."
"It provides solace… It feels like a supporter guiding me."
"Stop telling me about a poor sleep."
Just some of the comments people have shared from like-minded smartwatch wearers when I inquire what they think of theirs.
The Monitoring Conundrum
My current opinion on mine? Right now, annoying. It's telling me my speed is wrong, causing me to question whether the trees along my route are disrupting my GPS connection.
Millions of us attach these small devices onto our wrists and use them 24/7, apparently at ease with the fact they're constantly recording us.
Long past are the days when we relied on them exclusively to give us an idea of our daily steps. Today, they can measure our nightly rest, heart rate, heart rate variability (HRV), our body battery.
It's difficult to find a bodily function they aren't designed to measure.
But can they do what they say they do? And are the data points we analyse a accurate representation of the truth? Do they enhance our overall health, or do the multitude of readings and motivational messages just increase our everyday anxiety?
A Complicated Bond
"I do get a quite fixated with mine," an individual reveals.
While she appreciates how her device records her exercise, she finds some of its other features "overwhelming" at times - a feeling first discovered during a major life event.
Before she realised she could adjust the settings, her smartwatch kept telling her she was not being productive enough. Later on, the watch insists her she's had a restless night.
"I've got a young baby, there's no point to be notified I'm tired," she says. "That fact is only too well."
Why doesn't she just take it off?
"It's possible, perhaps, but I have this love-hate relationship with it," she says. "I love it for its exercise data, but I'm unsure whether the myriad other functions it can now do is maybe too much for me."
Inside the Device
Every device of smartwatch has its own unique way of measuring your health metrics and analysing your data, but the majority use detectors on the reverse of the watch.
They commonly project tiny, coloured LED lights onto your skin which can monitor pulsation, identifying your pulse rate. More advanced devices measure changes in the electrical current that runs through the skin to get an idea of your nervous system activity.
The Professional Viewpoint
A professor says that overall for smartwatches, it's a "difficult line" - while the rapidly advancing tech could potentially aid early diagnosis, "identifying issues before we show symptoms", it could also turn us watch wearers into the "concerned but fine".
He points out that some of the latest wearables can perform tests like heart rhythm analysis, which regularly monitor how stable the heart is. They can alert if someone is experiencing atrial fibrillation (AF), where there is irregular impulses in the heart causing an arrhythmia.
This does not necessarily indicate someone is imminently going to suffer a heart attack, but it can give an preliminary indication they might be more susceptible of a stroke in the years to come.
But how to understand these readings is complex. The expert concerns that as further capabilities are incorporated, people may find it hard to fully understand their data.
"I'm not entirely convinced that being able to monitor so many things is such a beneficial thing," he says.
A clinical psychologist focusing on patient behaviour echoes this sentiment. A study into the influence of wearable tech on a cohort of heart condition patients suggested a significant portion of those who were given devices to monitor their heart health experienced greater stress and were "more inclined to use medical services".
She observed a pattern with her patients - they spotted a alarming metric on their watch. They became worried. Their heart rate rose. They got increasingly anxious. They checked again, and their reading rose further.
"Upon viewing stats about ourselves that we can't properly interpret then, of course, we are going to seek clarification," the psychologist says. "We monitor, we obsess - it becomes a feedback loop."
