You don’t have to follow tech trends to have clocked the rise of wearable tech. Whether it’s Apple Watches, Fitbits, Garmins or Jawbones around the wrists of friends, colleagues and fellow commuters, these devices are everywhere. No matter your goal, there’s a snazzy gadget that will help you get there; performance-tracking watches, the more subtly designed “smart rings” and even futuristic “smart glasses”, each offering data points about everything from sleep quality and step count to period prediction and fertility monitoring.
But what’s the catch? On the surface, these devices create a health nirvana in which we can respond to real-time metrics. If a watch is helping us walk more, run faster and sleep better, should we not embrace the world of wearables? But as with every nascent technology and brave new world, there is a darker underbelly to be explored.
The quantified self
In 2022, we are predicted to reach one billion active wearable devices worldwide, and their rise is not going unnoticed. The Economist recently released an entire segment focused on wearable tech in healthcare, revealing that wearables now have the capacity to track 7500 “physiological and behavioural” variables, from the likelihood of stroke to diabetes reduction via various lifestyle prompts.
You don’t have to look far to find lists that rank wearables for anxiety and depression, wearables for running, wearables for swimming and wearables for sleep. From a medical point of view, the world of the wearable is an exciting one, offering advances in diagnosis and treatment that can only be positive. But what about the “everyday” tracker that records step count, sleep quality and “stress levels”? Is this access to a plethora of empirical data truly beneficial, or is the “Quantified Self” simply another digital self-portrait like that of our hyper-curated Instagram persona?
When we reduce ourselves to metrics on a screen, whether they are “likes” or steps, we view ourselves through an external lens, translating our lives into data points rather than human experience. Tuning into how we feel, and nurturing self-awareness, is much more complex than any digital portrayal.
If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em
It’s easy to see the appeal of wearables. They offer a semblance of control over our data in a world where we often feel we have none. If you want to “take charge of your health” and “realise your potential”, you just need to buy the latest tracking device.
In order to understand the impact of these trackers on our sense of self, I decided to get involved, borrowing a Fitbit Sense for a week to see how it would impact my day-to-day. I was struck by the well-crafted UX of each app; thousands of data points distilled into bite-size visuals, health insights and graphic displays, presented back to me via a personal health dashboard. I could see my unconscious daily movements at a glance and log my water, food and “mindfulness”.
As someone who already struggles with a fragmented sense of self, constantly trying to reconcile my work self, social media self and emotional self with my rational self, and as someone who struggles to be present, this felt like another diversion — yet more technology to remove me from the here and now.
I noticed the wearable quickly started affecting my perception of self and my experience from the moment I woke up. Being able to see the time I spent asleep, clocked to the exact minute, and the proportion that was light, REM or deep, and how this ranked compared to average sleep, completely shaped how I felt. I was awake considerably more than the
average person. My tiredness was no longer a feeling I could choose to interact with — it was a quantifiable fact. Would
I have felt like this without the data? Likely, I would have woken up and gone about my day, but now I felt panicked. If the data said my grogginess was a problem, then it was something to dwell on, another issue to solve. The wrong side of the bed was now the wrong side of the average REM bar.
After a week, I felt a noticeable neurosis. I was constantly checking my step count, my calorie count and my resting heart rate. In a rare moment of girl boss energy, I signed up to a HIIT class, but the experience was diluted by my ability to track my stats in real time.
I religiously checked my watch every few minutes, glancing at my BPM after every set. It had well and truly robbed me of any sense of the present; I was relying on the data to tell me how I was doing and what I was achieving. Had I done enough steps? Was my resting heart rate too high? The wearable was just another standard to live up to and, crucially, fail to meet. If any part of my day fell below the “average”, I felt like a failure.
Each morning, I looked to the app to tell me how I should perceive my day. Only six hours and 43 minutes sleep. Not enough. Bad day.
Time to get a new watch
I wanted to understand whether this experience was unique to me, so I spoke to Elizabeth Millard, a health and fitness writer specialising in sport tech, about how she’s perceived the rise of the wearable among amateur “athletes”. According to Elizabeth, the obsessive tendencies I was experiencing were not typical of wearable users. For most amateur athletes, weekend runners and exercise-lovers, wearables provide structure and tangible ways to track progress, a “nudge of motivation when they need it”.
While Elizabeth says there are those who “feel disappointed in their performance, compulsively keep track or are generally self-defeating”, overall the experiences among long-term users are positive. Contrary to my beliefs, it is not those who are overly competitive or health-centric who have positive experiences with wearables either, but everyday people who feel they lack motivation or have perceived problems that need to be solved. Perhaps the wearable is the healthy-living panacea its Silicone Valley peddlers suggest.
Once we started to delve deeper into the everyday wearer, however, the cracks became clear. According to Elizabeth, wearables have an incredibly high abandonment rate, perhaps due to the inability of the user to bridge the gap between the belief they should exercise, validated by the wearable, and their actual desire to do so. In other words, users disregard the wearable once they realise they cannot reconcile the self that the wearable expects them to be (the one who drinks their three litres of water and completes 10,000 steps daily), and the person who they are — the one who experiences a life that data cannot quantify.
Data is most appealing when it’s predictable, but the human experience is impossible to track in any kind of structured, linear, positively trending graph. We do not enjoy chaos, particularly when it comes to data, so perhaps this explains why many people are initially enthusiastic about wearables, until the motivation they provide proves to be fabricated.
For many, it seems the ability to combine the true self and the “Quantified Self” is too difficult to maintain long-term. While wearables have a positive impact on those with a short-term fitness goal, in the long term, they are just another standard to live up to. What was initially a “motivation hack” was in many cases later disregarded.
We might be about to hit one billion active devices, but it would be interesting to know how many more inactive devices lie behind that figure. How many of those who were promised “control of their health” felt like they received a visually-pleasing additional set of problems?
Is the world of wearables here to stay? Definitely. As Elizabeth says, our obsession with granularity is going nowhere. And while investment floods into the health-tech world, wearables are becoming increasingly sophisticated. More than just immediate access to our calorie burn, wearables are starting to look at gut health, customised vitamin mixes based on body composition, insights into recovery and rest, and diagnoses and treatment of a multitude of chronic conditions and lifestyle diseases.
Perhaps there is a world in which wearables can occupy a meaningful position in our lives, but at their current capabilities, they do little more than remove ourselves from the present experience of our bodies and lives and shift us into a digital, data-led experience of them. When I think of who I am, I don’t think of my REM sleep stats. I don’t live my life via my step count or my “stress score”. I think of the moments I share in my everyday that defy data points.
When there’s a wearable that can quantify how much I love my female friendships, or how delicious my chocolate bar of choice is, maybe I’ll rethink. But for now they are just another distraction from an intuitive understanding of ourselves and the beautiful chaos of our lived experiences.
Sophie Williams is a London-based writer filled with late-20s millennial angst and a healthy dose of cynicism, which offer the perfect foundation for her musings on gender roles, lowbrow pop culture and challenging societal norms.
