Health monitoring devices: advantages and disadvantages of a smart watch

RALEIGH, N.C. (Ivanhoe Newswire) — iWatch, Fitbit, Garmin and Oura are wearable gadgets, or smart watches, that have revolutionized the way we track our health and well-being. Harvard Health says about one in five people have them. But how accurate are they? New research shows the advantages and disadvantages of smart devices.

From steps and calories to heartbeat and sleep, your smart watch tracks everything.

Pros of these devices: Studies show that people who monitor their health using a smart device increase their physical activity by an additional 50 minutes a week and take an additional 1,200 steps a day.

Health alerts can detect potential health problems such as irregular heartbeats, but are these smart watches always right?

“It’s a good starting point, but it doesn’t work the same for everyone,” said Vanessa Volpe, a doctoral student and health psychologist at North Carolina State University.

Volpe’s team at NC State University put smart watches to the test.

“If you ever turn this device over, you will sometimes see rays of light, often green, coming from the back of the device,” she said.

Green light passes through the skin and is reflected back to the sensors in the watch, but Volpe said green light reflects differently on different skin tones.

“If you have more melanin in your skin, i.e. you have darker skin, light will not penetrate and will not be reflected to the same extent. For people of color, it can be as little as half of the signal reflected back and can impact readings of heart rate, blood pressure and irregular heart rhythms,” Volpe said. “The technology itself and the way it was designed did not take into account people of different skin tones, especially those with darker skin tones.”

Volpe sees this disparity as a sign of medicine’s failure to understand the impact of race on health and hopes her findings will help address racial disparities in health care.

Another disadvantage of wearing your health information on your sleeve: Your data may be tracked by an unknown third party. Fitness app data is not protected by HIPAA like health information, which means it can be sold or shared with data brokers who use it to personalize ads. Fitness bands typically connect to the user’s phone via Bluetooth, leaving personal information vulnerable to hacking attacks. To protect yourself, remember to change your default fitness settings so that your data cannot be shared.

Authors of this report include: Marsha Lewis, producer; Roque Correa, editor and Matt Goldschmidt, cameraman.

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