Are We Wearing Our Watches, or Are They Wearing Us?

Smartwatches promise greater control over our health, but constant self-tracking can also fuel anxiety and pressure to optimise. Nicole explores how we can benefit from wearable technology without letting data dictate how we feel.

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Rewind back to the early 2000s and a watch was basically a boring old person’s accessory, used for the sole purpose of telling the time. That was until smartphones came around and made checking the time on your wrist feel completely unnecessary and old-fashioned. 

Fast forward to today, watches are everywhere again. Except this time, they come back new and improved. Take a look around any classroom, gym or MRT carriage and you can spot the slim bands, wrapped around wrists, quietly counting steps, tracking sleep and buzzing with notifications. Apple kicked off the resurgence in 2015 with the Apple Watch and since then, wearable technology has exploded into something far bigger than telling the time. The technology used in these tiny devices can now track your blood oxygen saturation, heart rate variability and electrocardiograms. They can even show you how “ready” your body supposedly is for the day ahead.

Smartwatches today have become a communication tool between us and our bodies, creating a new kind of relationship with our own bodies.

There are genuinely powerful stories out there of these devices catching irregular heartbeats or dangerously low oxygen levels before anyone noticed something was wrong. For people managing chronic conditions or recovering from illnesses, this close monitoring can be life-changing and life-saving. However, I wonder how much of this data actually improves one’s life, especially if you are a healthy teenager or young adult with no real medical need for this level of close monitoring?

Trusting the watch, or our bodies?

If you’re not a biology student or a hypochondriac, chances are terms such as “heart rate variability” and “electrocardiograms” may sound like foreign terms to you. What this information is used for and how it contributes to our body may be a huge mystery. Most of us have no clue and simply glance at the colour of the ring on the screen (green good, red bad) and take the app’s word for it.

(If you are curious:

• Heart Rate Variability: https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/symptoms/21773-heart-rate-variability-hrv 

• Electrocardiograms: https://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/ekg/about/pac-20384983) 
  

Things can get a little weirder when it comes to making inferences based on our data. For example, your sleep score rates your energy levels as low, even though you wake up feeling completely fine. Do you trust the number, or do you trust how you actually feel? For some people, seeing the low score is enough to make them feel more tired and sluggish, even if nothing in their body has changed. This could be the placebo effect working in reverse, known as the nocebo effect, whereby believing that something is wrong can genuinely make you feel worse. 

This raises a worrying question: what happens when we begin outsourcing how we feel to a piece of data on our wrist, when we need an external divide to tell us whether we are okay? Wellbeing can also be shaped by subjectivity — how much fun we had, how comforted we feel after talking to a friend, and how worried we are by an assignment are elements of wellbeing that go beyond the physical. Our mental state cannot be easily tracked and reducing wellbeing to mere physical indicators risks flattening and simplifying something complicated and profound. This tension also shows up sharply during exercise. What happens when you are on a run and you feel genuinely good but your watch buzzes to tell you that your heart rate is too high or your effort level has crossed into some warning zone. Do we keep pushing because your body says you are fine or do we dial back because the tracker says otherwise?

There is no straightforward answer to the question I posed above but it is important to remember that these devices are merely estimating your physiology from indirect signals, not actual blood tests or medical equipment. While they are often incredibly accurate, they are not infallible. Learning to exercise well means learning to listen to our own body first.

If we are overly dependent on a device to tell us how we feel, we risk losing touch with the very instincts that are meant to protect and guide us.

The mental toll of self-tracking enabled by smartwatches

There is also a less talked about downside of tracking - the mental toll of constant self-surveillance. When tracking our steps, sleep, heart rate, stress levels and skin temperature every single day, health can feel less like something we live and more like something we have to manage. For some people, this could tip into genuine anxiety whereby a slightly irregular heart rate could be misread as a sign of a serious medical emergency. This fear is heightened for people who already have health anxieties or existing medical conditions, sometimes leading to unnecessary trips to the doctor. The term “orthosomnia” has been coined by sleep researchers, referring to an unhealthy preoccupation with getting the “perfect” sleep score. The obsessive focus on metrics often triggers anxiety and worsens insomnia, ironically ruining a person’s rest. This phenomenon is a prime example of how tools designed to improve wellbeing can instead undermine it when one is overly dependent on it. 

Sociologists have pointed out that self optimisation, the drive to constantly measure, refine and improve the body, is deeply tied to neoliberal ideas about the self and the belief that we are each personally responsible for maximising our own value and "wellness".

Sociologist Nikolas Rose has argued that this kind of voluntary self quantification turns self-branding into a way of life where constant tracking, improving and broadcasting oneself becomes less a choice and more an expectation. Wearables have made this change effortless, further perpetuating this mindset. Tracking every minute detail of our life can make each activity a data point to be optimised, blurring the line between taking care of oneself and the never-ending strive to do better. Additionally, as the data is collected by companies with their own commercial interests, the “empowerment” that wearables promises is never entirely just about you. Sociologist Elizabeth Wissinger notes that as users generate free data through their everyday movements and habits, much of the actual benefit of that data flows back to the corporations that built the device and not the person wearing it. Therefore, even the seemingly personal act of checking your readiness score sits inside a much bigger system where your body’s data has value to somebody else, regardless of whether it meaningfully improves your daily life. 

Data privacy – can my body be monetised?

“Data Body” is a term coined to describe how humans have become increasingly datafied with the use of digital technologies that generate information with and about our bodies and everyday lives. Deborah Lupton writes that digital monitoring practices tend to position the body as a data repository, with devices created to uncover and extract information that may be rendered useful. People are also called on to know their bodies better and more intensely to engage in data sense-making. This begets the question on how wearable technology companies process and use the sensitive data collected. Although wearable technology assures consumers of their commitment to data privacy, their terms and conditions are oftentimes ambiguous. As more of our personal information is being collected, people have become increasingly wary and weary of data protection.

For instance, after Oura announced an expanded manufacturing facility to support contracts with the US Department of Defense (DoD) and a technological link to data-mining firm Palantir Technologies, there was severe consumer backlash and viral protests, with many consumers going onto social media to post themselves throwing away their Oura Rings, believing that Oura was handing private consumer health and reproductive data to the military and the government. 

Yet, boycotting a single ring or deleting an app will not solve the underlying problem. Technology has become an indispensable part of how we live, work and relate to our own bodies. Trying to opt out entirely is not a realistic option for most of us living in a world where every device, app and platform is quietly gathering our data in the background. Ultimately, the issue does not lie with the ring or the watch but the vast and often invisible power imbalance between the companies collecting our most intimate data and the individuals generating it, with little insight into where that data goes or how it is used. 

How we can use smartwatches wisely

After all that is said, are wearable technologies actually worth it? I think that they genuinely do have real evidenced benefits. Research has shown that wearable technology can empower users to take greater ownership of their health by increasing awareness of habits like activity levels, sleep patterns and overall lifestyle choices. For many, simply seeing their data has been an effective nudge to get them to move more, sleep earlier or manage stress better. 

Instead, I would like to encourage people to be far more selective about the things that they track. Quite frankly, the benefits of wearable technology do not even have to be about health optimisation.

Personally, I only wear a Garmin watch when I run or exercise, not because I am obsessively analysing my VO2 max or recovery metrics but mostly because I want the kudos on Strava. There is something incredibly motivating and ego-fuelling about a friend liking your run or seeing a little badge pop up for a personal best. That is not quite a bad reason to wear one. I do not track my sleep or scrutinise my recovery scores and I try not to look down at my watch mid-exercise to check my heart rate. I know that if I were to begin checking myself against the daily morning report before I even got out of bed, I would start to let a number dictate how my day should feel. 

I highly doubt that wearable technology is actually necessary for most people but for those who are already locked into their watches, I strongly encourage you to experiment with taking it off more and getting back in tune with your own body.  I believe that the onus lies on the wearer to make sense of the data and use it to our benefit. A smartwatch is just a tool that can support your health journey but should not become the definition of it. The most important sensor we have continues to be the one we were born with and we should learn to place greater trust on it.