Is It Possible I'm Dependent on My Fitness Tracker?

An atmosphere of nervous excitement. Apparent is the frosty air emanating from my competitors as they execute the "pre-race" jiggle on the starting line.

A swift twitch of the hips.

I'm at my local weekly parkrun event and I'm serious. The countdown begins...

Hold on. I must adjust my device. The same goes for the runner beside me.

The person behind us sighs. I won't start until… there! Connection established, away I go.

During the scramble, it's hard to spot a person without a fitness tracker on it. And this extends beyond us athletes who use them.

It's a thriving, multi-billion pound industry. Brands like Samsung Galaxy dominate, featuring an extensive range of various devices to fit a spectrum of budgets. According to how high tech the model you choose, costs can vary between £100 to thousands of pounds.

"I find it infuriating, it's impossible to switch off."

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

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

Just some of the comments I've had from other smartwatch wearers when I question what they their opinion is on theirs.

A Sea of Statistics

My thoughts on my own device? Currently, annoying. It's indicating my speed is wrong, leading me to doubt whether the overhead branches along my route are blocking my location tracking.

Countless individuals of us attach these small devices onto our arms and wear them all day and night, apparently at ease with the fact they're continuously tracking us.

Gone are the days when we used them exclusively to give us an idea of our step count. Currently, they can track our nightly rest, heart rate, glucose levels, our recovery score.

It's difficult to find a bodily function they don't track.

But are they able to do what they say they do? And are the statistics we analyse a accurate representation of our actual health? Do they boost our mental and physical wellbeing, or do the avalanche of readings and motivational messages just contribute to our daily stresses?

A Complicated Bond

"I become a bit preoccupied with mine," an individual reveals.

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

Before she realised she could change its configuration, her smartwatch repeatedly informed her she was failing to be productive enough. In a new phase, the watch insists her she's had a poor sleep score.

"I have a young baby, I don't need to be told my sleep was poor," she says. "I know that perfectly well."

Is it not possible to just stop wearing it?

"I could, I suppose, but I have this complicated dynamic with it," she continues. "I love it for its fitness insights, I sometimes question whether the myriad other functions it can now do is perhaps excessive for me."

How Do They Work?

Every device of smartwatch has its own unique way of measuring your vitals and processing your data, but the most use detectors on the reverse of the watch.

They typically shine tiny, coloured LED lights onto your wrist which can observe blood flow, identifying your BPM. Higher-end devices analyse changes in the skin conductance that runs through the skin to assess your recovery state.

A Fine Balance

A professor says that overall for smartwatches, it's a "fine balance" - while the continuously improving tech could potentially save lives, "identifying issues before we notice anything", it could also turn us watch wearers into the "concerned but fine".

He points out that newer wearables can carry out tests like heart rhythm analysis, which constantly monitor how normal the heart is. They can alert if someone is experiencing a heart arrhythmia, where there is irregular electrical activity in the heart causing an arrhythmia.

This does not necessarily indicate someone is on the verge of a heart attack, but it can give an early warning they might be more susceptible of a stroke in the future.

But how to make sense of these numbers is not straightforward. The expert concerns that as further capabilities are introduced, 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 good idea," he says.

A professor studying patient behaviour concurs. A study into the influence of wearable tech on a set of heart condition patients suggested a minority of those who were given devices to monitor their heart health experienced increased anxiety and were "far more likely to use doctor's time".

She observed a pattern with her patients - they noticed a alarming metric on their watch. They became worried. Their BPM went up. They got more worried. They re-examined the data, and their reading increased again.

"If we see data about ourselves that we don't really understand then, naturally, we are going to become concerned," the psychologist says. "We look, we obsess - it becomes a feedback loop."