Smartwatches are great, not just for providing notifications without making us have to pull out our smartphones to check them, but also for our health. The Apple Watch, for example, will prompt you to get up and walk around at regular intervals, as well as alerting wearers if they have an irregular heart rhythm they should get checked out by a doctor.
But not everything about fitness-tracking smartwatches is so good for our health, claims a new report from the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. It suggests that smartwatches, while providing no shortage of useful data, also increase anxiety levels. In a study of 27 heart patients who use Fitbit trackers to measure their sleep, heart rates and physical activity, the researchers found that the more people learned about their biometric data, the more anxious they became about it.
“Our study shows that, overall, self-measurements are more problematic than beneficial when it comes to the patient experience,” Tariq Osman Andersen, an assistant professor at the University of Copenhagen’s Department of Computer Science, said in a statement. “Patients begin to use the information from their Fitbits just as they would use a doctor. However, they don’t get help interpreting their watch data. This makes them unnecessarily anxious, or they may learn something that is far from reality.”
The insight is interesting, albeit just another example of the kind of tech creep we’ve seen as other pieces of technology, purporting to make our lives easier, have become more and more ubiquitous. A smartphone that allows you to make calls whenever you want also allows you to be called whenever. Social media that connects people also makes it possible to bully people. As cultural theorist Paul Virilio once pointed out, the inventor of the ship is also the inventor of the shipwreck.
In keeping with that dichotomy, Osman Andersen said that, in situations where the Fitbit data showed people that why were sleeping well and had a normal heart rate, it could be calming. It was when the results weren’t so good that they tended to be detrimental to people’s anxiety.
Hopefully more studies will be carried out to explore this phenomenon in more detail, and using other smart wearables, in the future. From the sound of things, device makers should also do more to ensure that users are able to properly interpret the data they are shown.
The OnePlus Buds Clip are a new pair of open-ear earbuds built around a simple convenience. They join Sony’s LinkBuds Clip in the growing ear-cuff category, but either OnePlus bud can go on either ear.
Sensors recognize how the earbuds are being worn and route the audio channels accordingly. There’s no label to check before putting them on, and the feature also works when only one bud is used.
We buy fitness bands and activity trackers to keep tabs on our exercise, but it is easy to forget to start tracking or switch modes when moving between different activities. For Fitbit and Pixel Watch users, that could soon become a lot less annoying, as Google is rolling out a major upgrade to automatic activity tracking that can recognize more than 100 types of exercise, up from just 10 before.
Google first showed off the improved tracking earlier this month alongside the Fitbit Edge. It is now coming to Fitbit Air and the Pixel Watch 3, 4, and 5, and Google claims the added context behind the system makes workout detection nearly twice as accurate while cutting missed activities by more than half. Fitbit Edge will support it too.