As I am typing this, a device rests on my wrist that purports to unlock a trove of real-time information about my body\u2019s performance. I can click a button and check my heart rate and review how much it\u2019s varied over the course of the day. It can tell me how many steps I\u2019ve taken, how many minutes I\u2019ve been \u201cactive\u201d throughout the day, and \u2014 if I wore it while I slept \u2014 just how well I rested, according to the data its sensors can pick up from my arm.<\/p>\n
The Apple Watch is a remarkable piece of technology, when you stop and really think about what it does. It\u2019s no surprise, perhaps, then, that we have collectively become obsessed with these things. One 2023 government survey found<\/a> that one in three Americans wear a smartwatch or wristband to track their health and fitness. More recent industry surveys<\/a> put that figure even higher: More than half of the US population owns a wearable or connected device and tracks at least one health metric with it.<\/p>\n That\u2019s a lot of people who are swimming in the ocean of information that our Apple Watches, and FitBits, and Oura Rings, and Whoops report back to us. Dr. Michael Joyner<\/a>, who studies the physiology of exercise at the Mayo Clinic, said he has a three-pronged criteria for thinking about the usefulness of these metrics: Is it measurable? Is what you\u2019re measuring actually meaningful? And is the information that you\u2019re receiving actually actionable?<\/p>\n \u201cIf one or two are missing, the thing may be the most interesting thing in the world. It may be cool,\u201d he said. \u201cBut it\u2019s not going to make a difference in long-term outcomes.\u201d<\/p>\n Across medicine, we are developing remarkable tools for detecting things in the human body, outpacing our ability to interpret what we are finding<\/a>. We are getting closer to a future where these devices could offer invaluable insights into how our body is performing outside of the doctor\u2019s office or hospital, but here in the present, we should keep our expectations in check.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s what you should know about some of the most common metrics that wearables track.<\/p>\n Do we really understand what our wearables are telling us?<\/p>\n These devices claim to track both old-fashioned and new-fangled measures of your body\u2019s performance. You\u2019ve got your heart rate \u2014 something humans have been able to pick up from the wrist before anybody had dreamed of smart devices \u2014 and your step count. My Apple Watch estimates how many calories I have burned throughout the day. The Oura Ring takes your temperature, which can help predict ovulation or offer an early sign that you\u2019re coming down with something.<\/p>\n Sign up for the Good Medicine newsletter<\/p>\n Our political wellness landscape has shifted: new leaders, shady science, contradictory advice, broken trust, and overwhelming systems. How is anyone supposed to make sense of it all? Vox\u2019s senior correspondent Dylan Scott<\/a> has been on the health beat for a long time, and every week, he\u2019ll wade into sticky debates, answer fair questions, and contextualize what\u2019s happening in American healthcare policy. Sign up here<\/a>.<\/p>\n But as the technology has gotten better, new measures for things many of us have never heard of have emerged. Heart rate variability, or HRV, has gained a lot of recent interest. It assesses the tiny variations, measured in milliseconds, in the rhythm of your heartbeat; the Economist dubbed it<\/a> \u201cthe most useful indicator\u201d of your overall health. Some devices then use HRV to deliver \u201crecovery\u201d scores that judge how well your body bounces back from your workout or \u201cstress\u201d scores that attempt to quantify how much strain you are under.<\/p>\n HRV demonstrates the conundrum that wearables can present to us, Joyner said. The metric itself has a scientific basis: Researchers have, in fact, found<\/a> that the amount your heart rate varies over time is associated with your overall health. In general, a higher HRV is better than low, because it suggests your body is more adaptable and better regulated.<\/p>\n But that doesn\u2019t necessarily mean that tracking your HRV from minute to minute with a smartwatch will translate to better health. For starters, we don\u2019t have specific interventions for improving HRV, Joyner said. We don\u2019t even have universally accepted definitions<\/a> of what high or low HRV is.<\/p>\n In any case, the best strategies are the same heart health guidelines we\u2019ve known about for decades: don\u2019t smoke, don\u2019t drink to excess, eat a healthy diet, exercise. You didn\u2019t need a smartwatch to tell you that\u2019s the best way to take care of your heart, Joyner pointed out. So what good was really derived from closely monitoring your HRV?<\/p>\n \u201cAs an individual metric that you can track and do something about, it\u2019s interesting, but there\u2019s no definitive data that you\u2019re going to get better,\u201d Joyner, who was speaking for himself and not the Mayo Clinic, said. \u201cFollow the guidelines. People who follow the guidelines are going to do better on these metrics. But whether you can intervene specifically to make the metrics better or should pay much attention to them, who knows?\u201d<\/p>\n Dr. Ami Bhatt,<\/a> chief innovation officer at the American College of Cardiology, told me that the bedrocks of evaluating your heart health are still the old mainstays like your blood pressure and your cholesterol, along with newer metrics checked via blood test such as ApoB and lipoprotein. Are you a smoker? What\u2019s your family history?<\/p>\n The value from wearables is less about the specific numbers they are reporting \u2014 especially with something like HRV, for which there are not universal guidelines \u2014 and more about the long-term trends they can track. By collecting your personal data over time, they can help you figure out what\u2019s normal for you and help you notice if something changes. So don\u2019t freak out if your HRV is different from somebody else\u2019s, or you see one abhorrent reading in your daily report. But if you notice a change in your resting heart rate or HRV that persists over time, then it might be worth going to see a doctor about it.<\/p>\n \u201cWe don\u2019t want to overreact to just one abnormal reading,\u201d Bhatt said. \u201cIf you just know your baseline when you\u2019re relatively healthy, you can catch the trends.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s all about having realistic expectations about what your wearable can deliver \u2014 and recognizing that, for some things, the old ways are still better. When it comes to those metrics that incorporate HRV to determine your stress and \u201crecovery,\u201d Joyner said that self-reported data (literally, how do you feel?) remains the more accurate way to evaluate a person.<\/p>\n And at a certain point, your wearable can straight-up make your health worse. Fixating too much on your sleep problems, for example, can paradoxically cause more sleep problem. An American Society of Sleep Medicine survey<\/a> this year found that 76 percent of US reported losing sleep because they were worrying about their sleep. It\u2019s a problem \u2014 dubbed \u201corthosominia\u201d \u2014 that scientists have been warning<\/a> about for nearly a decade: the possibility that our obsession with better sleep, and doing things like wearing a device to track our sleep, could actually give us insomnia.<\/p>\n Bhatt said she\u2019d like to see these devices develop the capability to detect when a user may be checking their data a little too compulsively. Joyner, for his part, said he worried that the culture around health and wellness could, ironically, create a lot of stress for the people who get deeply invested in tracking their activity.<\/p>\n \u201cI actually worry we\u2019re entering a too-much-information world,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s going to be anxiety-provoking.\u201d<\/p>\n How to have a healthier relationship with your wearables<\/p>\n Even as we recognize the limitations of wearables, that doesn\u2019t mean they can\u2019t be useful \u2014 and they\u2019re going to keep getting better.<\/p>\n Right now, there are obvious situations where a wearable can be helpful. As Bhatt suggested, they can help you understand your personal baseline and notice any changes. Certain patients, such as those with congenital heart failure, can clearly benefit from ongoing monitoring of their heart\u2019s performance, per the American Heart Association<\/a>. Anybody can use a wearable to make sure their heart rate doesn\u2019t reach dangerous levels during a workout. And these devices could ultimately prove effective in catching underlying heart problems \u2014 but there is still work to do. A 2019 study<\/a> on wearables and atrial fibrillation is telling: At the time, only a tiny percentage of wearers received a notification of an irregular heartbeat, suggesting that there were others that the devices were missing. But, for those who did get an alert, the majority of them did in fact have A-fib. (The FDA has since said that several smartwatches<\/a> are capable of A-fib detection.) Some patients who have had a serious cardiac event are being asked<\/a> to put on a wearable, so their doctors can remotely monitor their heart, utilizing an AI assistant that checks the incoming data for any signs of a pending emergency.<\/p>\n And these are the worst wearables we\u2019ll ever have. The future iterations of these devices are going to become more precise and more integrated with AI, which could allow them to ultimately provide more value to the people wearing them. The hypothetical potential for integrating wearables with health care delivery more broadly is immense.<\/p>\n \u201cNone of these things will exist in a silo,\u201d Bhatt said. \u201cYour health records, how you\u2019re doing, your wearables, your lab data, people are going to be pulling those together\u2026and trying to give you insights.\u201d<\/p>\n But for now, for the average person, it\u2019s more of a personal choice. Joyner, whose work is all about maximizing human performance, does not wear a smartwatch. Bhatt likes to experiment with different devices with a certain goal in mind, like trying to improve her sleep over the course of a few months.<\/p>\n As Bhatt put it to me, if a wearable motivates you to take your health more seriously, then it\u2019s already doing your body some good. \u201cThe best health metric is the one that changes what you do in a way that improves your health,\u201d she said. \u201cFor you and I, that may be different things. For your grandmother, it\u2019s something else. For the woman down the road, it\u2019s something else.\u201d<\/p>\n At the most fundamental level, people who use wearables tend to move more when they do \u2014 up to 40 more minutes of walking per day, according to a 2022 Lancet study<\/a>. That is a gain for their health; recent research has shown that even a little bit of movement can have life-saving benefits<\/a>. The more wearables encourage people to move, the more they can deliver real health benefits.<\/p>\n So if you like wearing one, that\u2019s fine. I\u2019m not dropping my Apple Watch\u2019s step tracker any time soon, because it pushes me to get moving. But be mindful of how your use affects you and how preoccupied you are with certain metrics. Stress is one of the worst things for your health. So is a lack of sleep. If you find your sleep metrics are keeping you up at night, or that your sleep seems to have gotten worse since you started using it, it\u2019s okay to take it off.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As I am typing this, a device rests on my wrist that purports to unlock a trove of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":577654,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[258],"tags":[18,29602,282,148332,135,19,3536,17,2101,82],"class_list":["post-577653","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-gadgets","tag-eire","tag-emerging-tech","tag-gadgets","tag-good-medicine","tag-health","tag-ie","tag-innovation","tag-ireland","tag-public-health","tag-technology"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/116892492479910113","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/577653","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=577653"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/577653\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/577654"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=577653"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=577653"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=577653"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}