Wearables may work well for some things, like measuring your sleep and heart rate—but they may have serious limitations when it comes to measuring your stress levels.
A new study published in the Journal of Psychopathology and Clinical Science found that self-reported and wearable measures of stress did not overlap for most of the individuals they looked at, while associations were also fairly weak for tiredness. The study looked at 781 college students over a period of three months, who all wore a Garmin Vivosmart 4 watch. The participants provided updates four times a day on their self-reported emotional states, which were then measured against the data collected by the Garmin device.
Eiko Fried, one of the authors of the study, told The Guardian the correlation between the smartwatch and self-reported stress scores was “basically zero.”
“The findings raise important questions about what wearable data can or can’t tell us about mental states,” said Fried. “Be careful and don’t live by your smartwatch—these are consumer devices, not medical devices.”
He added that he’d seen his smartwatch tell him he was stressed during a gym workout and while talking to a friend he hadn’t seen for a while at a wedding.
Still, the study unearthed some strengths as well as weaknesses. The Garmin wearable performed well as a sleep tracker. Two-thirds of participants had significant overlap between their wearable’s data and their self-reported assessments of their sleep quality, while correlations in terms of tiredness were much weaker. The researchers were even able to predict an extra two hours of sleep time when a participant reported a day of good sleep, versus a bad one.
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PCMag has reached out to Garmin for comment.
More academic scrutiny could be very welcome in the world of wearable devices. Not only is the market booming in the US, more and more public bodies are looking into their potential health applications. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently announced he wants every American to wear a smartwatch, fitness tracker, or other piece of wearable health tech as part of his “Making America Healthy Again” (MAHA) agenda.
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About Will McCurdy
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