Could I Be Hooked on This Smartwatch?

A sense of building tension. Apparent is the chilled vapour exhaled by my competitors as they perform the "pre-race" wiggle on the starting line.

A swift twitch of the hips.

I'm at my local 5km community parkrun and I mean business. Three, two, one...

Wait a second. I must sort my watch. The same goes for the guy beside me.

The person in the line tuts. I refuse to go until… yes! Signal acquired, I'm off.

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

It's a explosive, massive sector. Names like Garmin lead the market, all offering an broad selection of various versions to suit a spectrum of lifestyles. Based on how feature-packed the model you select, price tags can start from a hundred pounds to thousands of pounds.

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

"It provides solace… It's like a friend supporting me."

"Stop telling me I've experienced a bad night's sleep."

A small sample of the comments I've received from like-minded smartwatch wearers when I question what they think of theirs.

The Data Dilemma

My thoughts on mine? At this moment, irritating. It's reporting I'm not hitting my target, causing me to question whether the foliage I'm running below are disrupting my satellite signal.

Countless individuals of us attach these compact devices onto our arms and use them 24/7, ostensibly at ease with the fact they're perpetually monitoring us.

Long past are the days when we used them exclusively to give us an idea of our pedometer reading. Currently, they can track our sleep quality, stress levels, glucose levels, our VO2 max.

It's a challenge to find a health indicator they don't track.

But do they do what they advertise? And are the data points we obsess over a faithful picture of the truth? Do they improve our daily wellness, or do the multitude of readings and cheerleading alerts just increase our daily stresses?

Addiction or Aid?

"I become a a little fixated with mine," an individual confesses.

While she values how her device monitors her runs, she finds some of its other capabilities "excessive" at times - a feeling first discovered during a major life event.

Prior to discovering she could change its configuration, her smartwatch repeatedly informed her she was being insufficiently active enough. In a new phase, the watch insists her she's had a bad night's sleep.

"I have a six-month old, I don't need to be told my sleep was poor," she says. "That fact is all too clearly."

Is it not possible to just stop wearing it?

"It's possible, perhaps, but I'm in this push-pull dynamic with it," she explains. "I appreciate it for its exercise data, I just wonder whether the additional features it can now do is possibly excessive for me."

How Do They Work?

Different brands of smartwatch has its own unique way of measuring your health metrics and processing your data, but the most use optical sensors on the underside of the watch.

They typically emit tiny, coloured LED lights onto your arm which can observe blood flow, detecting your heartbeat. Sophisticated devices detect changes in the skin conductance that runs through the skin to assess your stress levels.

The Professional Viewpoint

A data scientist says that in general for smartwatches, it's a "fine balance" - while the rapidly advancing tech could actually 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 medical-grade monitoring, which regularly monitor how healthy the heart is. They can flag if someone is experiencing atrial fibrillation (AF), where there is irregular electrical activity in the heart causing an irregular heartbeat.

This does not automatically signal someone is on the verge of a heart attack, but it can give an early warning they might be more at risk of a heart problem in the years to come.

But how to understand these figures is not straightforward. The expert concerns that as additional features are introduced, people may find it hard to fully understand their data.

"I'm not entirely convinced that the ability to monitor so much data is such a good idea," he says.

A professor focusing on cardiology echoes this sentiment. Her work into the impact of wearable tech on a set of heart condition patients suggested a significant portion of those who were given devices to monitor their heart health experienced heightened worry and were "had a higher tendency to use doctor's time".

She noted a cycle with her patients - they noticed a alarming metric on their watch. They felt anxious. Their BPM increased. They got even more concerned. They re-examined the data, and their heart rate went up again.

"If we see numbers about ourselves that we can't properly interpret then, naturally, we are going to seek clarification," the psychologist says. "We look, we re-check - it becomes a feedback loop."