The iWatch, Fitbit, Garmin and Oura, all are wearable gadgets or smartwatches that have revolutionized how we track our health and wellness.
Harvard Health says about one in five people have one. But how accurate are they? New research shows the pros and cons of smart devices.
From steps and calories to heartbeats and ZZ’s, your smart watch tracks it all.
The upside of these devices, studies show, is that people who track their health with a smart device increase their physical activity an extra 50 minutes per week, and an extra 1,200 steps are taken daily.
Health alerts can detect potential health problems like irregular heartbeats, but are these smart watches always right?
“They’re good starting points, but they don’t work the same way for everyone,” said Vanessa Volpe, a health psychologist at North Carolina State University.
Volpe’s team at N.C. State put smartwatches to the test.
“If you ever turn over that device, you can sometimes see beams of light, often green light, coming out of the back of that device,” Volpe said.
That green light is sent through the skin and reflected back to sensors in the watch, but Volpe says green light reflects differently on different skin tones.
“If you have more melanin in your skin, so if you have darker skin, then light will not penetrate and be reflected back to the same degree,” Volpe said.
It could be as low as half the signal being reflected back for people of color and could impact readings for heart rate, blood pressure, and irregular heart rhythms.
“The technology itself, the way it was designed, was not taking into account folks with different skin tones, especially folks with darker skin tones,” explained Volpe.
Volpe sees this discrepancy as a sign of the medical field’s failure to grasp the impact of race on health and hopes her findings will help address racial disparities in healthcare.
Another downside to wearing your health info on your sleeve is that your information may be tracked by an unknown third party.
Fitness app data is not protected like health information by HIPAA, which means it can be sold or shared with data brokers who use it to personalize ads.
Fitness trackers generally connect to a user’s phone via Bluetooth, leaving personal data open to hacking. To protect yourself, be sure to change your fitness default settings so your information cannot be shared.