They are supposed to monitor you throughout the working day and help make sure that life is not getting on top of you.
But a study has concluded that smartwatches cannot accurately measure your stress levels – and may think you are overworked when really you are just excited.
Researchers found almost no relationship between the stress levels reported by the smartwatch and the levels that participants said they experienced. However, recorded fatigue levels had a very slight association with the smartwatch data, while sleep had a stronger correlation.
Eiko Fried, an author of the study, said the correlation between the smartwatch and self-reported stress scores was “basically zero”.
He added: “This is no surprise to us given that the watch measures heart rate and heart rate doesn’t have that much to do with the emotion you’re experiencing – it also goes up for sexual arousal or joyful experiences.”
He noted that his Garmin had previously told him he was stressed when he was working out in the gym and when excitedly talking to a friend he had not seen for a while at a wedding.
“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.”
Fried said although there was a lot of academic work looking for physiological signals that can act as proxies for emotional states, most were not precise enough. This is because there is an overlap between positive and negative feelings – for example, hair standing on end can signal anxiety as well as excitement.
Fried, an associate professor in the department of clinical psychology at Leiden University in the Netherlands, and his team tracked stress, fatigue and sleep for three months on 800 young adults wearing Garmin vivosmart 4 watches. They asked them to report four times a day on how stressed, fatigued or sleepy users were feeling before cross-referencing the data.
And the results, published in the Journal of Psychopathology and Clinical Science, found that none of the participants saw the stress scores on their watches meet the baseline for significant change when they recorded feeling stressed. And for a quarter of participants, their smartwatch told them they were stressed or unstressed when they self-reported feeling the opposite.
The relationship with physical fatigue, described by Garmin as “body battery”, was “quite a bit stronger…
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