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

A sense of building tension. I can see the chilled vapour exhaled by my fellow runners as they perform the "pre-race" jiggle on the beginning point.

A quick movement of the hips.

I'm at my local weekly parkrun event and I'm focused. Three, two, one...

Oh, hang on. I have to sort my watch. The same goes for the runner alongside me.

The person waiting expresses impatience. I refuse to go until… yes! GPS ready, I'm off.

During the scramble, it's difficult to spot a wrist without a fitness tracker on it. And this isn't only us runners who use them.

It's a booming, multi-billion dollar market. Brands like Apple Watch dominate, featuring an broad range of diverse models to cater to a range of budgets. Based on how advanced the model you go for, price tags can vary between an affordable sum to a small fortune.

"It makes me crazy, I'm unable to switch off."

"It provides solace… It feels like a companion encouraging me."

"Stop telling me I've had a restless night."

A handful of the responses people have shared from like-minded smartwatch wearers when I inquire what they think of theirs.

The Data Dilemma

My feelings on mine? Currently, irritating. It's telling me I'm not hitting my target, making me wonder whether the foliage I'm passing under are blocking my satellite signal.

Countless individuals of us fasten these little monitors onto our arms and keep them on constantly, seemingly unconcerned with the fact they're continuously tracking us.

Long past are the days when we relied on them only to give us an rough count of our pedometer reading. Currently, they can analyse our nightly rest, blood pressure, glucose levels, our recovery score.

It's difficult to find a physical metric they fail to monitor.

But do they do what they advertise? And are the data points we obsess over a faithful picture of our actual health? Do they enhance our mental and physical wellbeing, or do the multitude of metrics and cheerleading alerts just contribute to our daily stresses?

Addiction or Aid?

"I become a bit fixated with mine," one user reveals.

While she appreciates how her device tracks her runs, she finds some of its other functions "overwhelming" at times - a feeling that became apparent during a significant period.

Until she found out she could put it into a specific mode, her smartwatch kept telling her she was not being energetic enough. Now, the watch frequently reports her she's had a poor sleep score.

"I am caring for a infant, there's no point to be told I'm tired," she says. "I know that all too clearly."

Why doesn't she just remove it?

"It's possible, perhaps, but I'm in this complicated dynamic with it," she continues. "I value it for its workout tracking, but I'm unsure whether all the other things it can now do is perhaps overkill for me."

The Technology Behind the Tracking

Different brands of smartwatch has its own unique way of tracking your health metrics and processing your data, but the majority use sensors on the back of the watch.

They commonly emit small, green LED lights onto your arm which can observe blood flow, detecting your BPM. Sophisticated devices analyse changes in the skin conductance that runs through the skin to get an idea of your recovery state.

A Fine Balance

One expert says that overall for smartwatches, it's a "delicate equilibrium" - while the continuously improving tech could potentially save lives, "identifying issues before we show symptoms", it could also turn us device users into the "concerned but fine".

He points out that newer wearables can perform tests like electrocardiograms (ECGs), which regularly monitor how normal the heart is. They can flag if someone is experiencing an irregular rhythm, where there is erratic electrical activity in the heart causing an arrhythmia.

This does not automatically signal someone is imminently going to suffer a heart attack, but it can give an preliminary indication they might be more at risk of a stroke in the long term.

But how to make sense of these figures is complex. The expert fears that as additional features are introduced, people may struggle to fully comprehend their data.

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

A professor specialising in patient behaviour concurs. Research into the influence of wearable tech on a set of heart condition patients suggested a noticeable percentage of those who were given devices to monitor their condition experienced heightened worry and were "more inclined to use healthcare resources".

She noted a vicious circle with her patients - they saw a alarming metric on their watch. They felt anxious. Their BPM went up. They got even more concerned. They looked a second time, and their reading increased again.

"Upon viewing data about ourselves that we don't really understand then, understandably, we are going to seek clarification," the psychologist says. "We look, we check again - it becomes a feedback loop."