Am I Hooked on My Fitness Tracker?

There's a building tension. Visible is the cold breath coming from my competitors as they perform the "pre-race" shuffle on the start line.

A quick movement of the hips.

I'm at my local Saturday morning race and I'm serious. The countdown begins...

Oh, hang on. I have to adjust my device. The same goes for the guy alongside me.

The person waiting sighs. I refuse to go until… done! Signal acquired, and I'm running.

Amidst the crowd, it's challenging to see a person without a fitness tracker on it. And this extends beyond us runners who use them.

We're witnessing a thriving, multi-billion dollar sector. Companies like Apple Watch lead the market, each with an extensive array of various versions to fit a spectrum of budgets. Depending on how advanced the watch you select, costs can vary between an affordable sum to a small fortune.

"It drives me insane, it's impossible to stop checking."

"It provides solace… It acts as a companion supporting me."

"Please don't notify me I've experienced a restless night."

Just some of the comments I've received from fellow smartwatch wearers when I inquire what they feel about theirs.

The Data Dilemma

My feelings on my own device? At this moment, annoying. It's reporting my speed is wrong, causing me to question whether the trees I'm passing under are disrupting my location tracking.

Countless individuals of us strap these compact gadgets onto our arms and keep them on all day and night, ostensibly comfortable with the fact they're continuously tracking us.

Long past are the days when we relied on them solely to give us an idea of our step count. Currently, they can measure our nightly rest, stress levels, oxygen saturation, our recovery score.

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

But do they do what they say they do? And are the data points we scrutinise a accurate representation of our actual health? Do they enhance our mental and physical wellbeing, or do the avalanche of readings and motivational messages just add to our everyday anxiety?

A Complicated Bond

"I find myself getting a bit fixated with mine," a wearer confesses.

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

Before she realised she could put it into a specific mode, her smartwatch constantly alerted her she was failing to be energetic enough. In a new phase, the watch insists her she's had a bad night's sleep.

"I've got a young baby, I don't need to be informed I've not slept," she says. "I'm acutely aware perfectly well."

Couldn't she just stop wearing it?

"I could, perhaps, but I'm in this love-hate relationship with it," she says. "I love it for its workout tracking, I sometimes question whether the additional features it can now do is perhaps excessive for me."

Inside the Device

Every device of smartwatch has its own proprietary way of tracking your bodily functions and processing your data, but the most use detectors on the underside of the watch.

They commonly project small, green LED lights onto your skin which can monitor capillary action, identifying your BPM. Sophisticated devices analyse changes in the electrical current 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 "delicate equilibrium" - while the continuously improving tech could potentially aid early diagnosis, "identifying issues before we show symptoms", it could also turn us the tracked into the "worried well".

He points out that the most advanced wearables can perform tests like medical-grade monitoring, which constantly monitor how normal the heart is. They can alert if someone is experiencing a heart arrhythmia, where there is irregular signals in the heart causing an uneven pulse.

This does not mean someone is on the verge of a heart attack, but it can give an early warning they might be more vulnerable of a heart problem in the future.

But how to interpret these figures is not straightforward. The expert worries that as additional features are incorporated, people may find it hard to fully comprehend their data.

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

A clinical psychologist studying cardiology echoes this sentiment. A study into the impact of wearable tech on a cohort of individuals with health issues 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 healthcare resources".

She noted a vicious circle with her patients - they noticed a alarming metric on their watch. They became worried. Their pulse rose. They got even more concerned. They checked again, and their reading rose further.

"If we see numbers about ourselves that we don't really understand then, naturally, we are going to seek clarification," the psychologist says. "We check, we check again - it becomes a vicious cycle."