Smart Health Devices: Too Much Noise and Not Enough Data

July 19, 2022

Nowadays, it seems like everyone has a health tracker. From steps and heart rate to sleep quality and menstrual cycles, people can track just about any health metric they want.

But is it actually helping us live healthier lives? Or are smart health devices just adding to the noise?

What’s the Hype About Smart Health Devices?

The advent of technology that could track health data from our phones or wrists was pretty incredible. A tiny computer could motivate us to lose weight, take the stairs, drink more water, and get more sleep. But just as important as knowing what this data can do for us is knowing what it can’t do.

Some information from smart health devices can be informative and insightful for personal use, even leading to healthy behavior changes. But it turns out that smart health device data isn’t all that helpful for physicians.

Your doctor doesn’t need to know what your blood pressure is 18 times a day. And you really don’t need to know, either.

The body is a finely tuned machine that can adapt and fix its own problems for the most past — and we should let it. Physicians don’t make medical decisions based on constant, daily metrics, but rather on changes over time, which we can determine through regular office visits. Then we adapt and adjust your care from there.

What Are the Most Common Smart Health Devices?

For context, we’re defining smart health devices as wearable electronic devices that monitor body function. The market for these little devices is enormous, but these are some of the most common wearables we’re asked about:

  • WHOOP band: tracks sleep and recovery.
  • Oura Ring: tracks sleep, recovery, and workout.
  • KardiaMobile: takes EKG to track heart health.
  • Apple Watch: tracks sleep, recovery, activity, and EKG.

Data From Smart Health Devices: Informative vs. Entertaining

Some information from smart health devices can be medically useful, and some is more for personal use or entertainment.

Medically Useful Information

Irregular Heart Rhythm

Occasionally, KardiaMobile or Apple Watch EKGs can pick up on an irregular heart rhythm. Of all the stats smart health devices track, this is the one that can be most helpful in alerting your doctor to a potential issue.

Blood Oxygen

Pulse oximeters measure your blood oxygen level. This can be useful in certain cases, like with COVID-19, but it’s not helpful for everyday use. And even with COVID, oxygen desaturation isn’t as common with newer variants.

Infographic: Smart Health Devices: Too Much Noise and Not Enough Data

For Entertainment Only

Other stats may be helpful for you personally, but not medically useful to your doctor.

For example, maybe you notice that your sleep score drops on nights when you drink alcohol, or that your resting heart rate lowers when you exercise regularly. Data like this may provide insights into how your lifestyle and habits affect your health, giving you the power to make proactive changes. So if counting your steps helps motivate you to move more, then wearing a pedometer might make a real difference.

The caveat is that this data just isn’t useful from a clinical perspective. Your doctor doesn’t need to know your sleep stats, your blood pressure one night at 2 a.m., or your cardio zone when you work out. Physicians have other proven ways of evaluating your health.

Below are some stats that may be fun to monitor, but aren’t necessarily medically useful.

Heart Rate Variability

It’s not unreasonable to try to get your heart rate variability down. Clinically, however, we don’t yet have any evidence showing whether this matters to your health. So as physicians, we won’t be making clinical decisions based on heart rate variability.

Blood Pressure

This one is tricky. Knowing your blood pressure is important, but checking it multiple times a day is not.

So many factors cause your blood pressure to fluctuate throughout the day that following those changes can take you on a stressful rollercoaster ride. Even the anxiety from checking your readings too often can increase your blood pressure!

Physicians care about the general category of your blood pressure over a week or two, not about the fluctuations throughout the day. To find a balance, try taking advantage of the blood pressure kiosk at Walmart or your local pharmacy occasionally instead of subjecting yourself to constant monitoring.

EKG

The heart is a complex organ. A lot can happen with it, most of which is nothing to worry about. But if you’re constantly monitoring your EKG, these readings can cause undue anxiety.

Premature ventricular contractions (PVCs), for example, are a common type of irregular heartbeat that can appear in people’s EKG readings. Occasional PVCs look scary, but they’re really just benign irregularities brought on by stress, caffeine, lack of sleep, or all of the above.

The complicated nature of EKGs means it’s best to leave their interpretation up to physicians.

Cholesterol

It’s common knowledge that lower cholesterol is better, but what we really want from lower cholesterol is to avoid a heart attack. Cholesterol numbers by themselves may not give you the information you need to achieve a better health outcome. So cholesterol doesn’t need to be the target. Reducing your risk of heart attack needs to be the target.

Bottom Line on Smart Health Devices

If a smart health device makes you more aware of behavioral shifts you can make to improve your health, that’s a fantastic application for it.

On the clinical side, your physician has spent years figuring out which data they need to help you achieve the best health outcomes, and they know how to make decisions based on that data. Additional metrics — even pages and pages of it — from a smart health device won’t influence that.

The point of tracking health data is better health outcomes that improve your quality of life. So if your stats aren’t improving your quality of life, or if they’re causing stress and anxiety, maybe you don’t need to track them. At the very least, consider taking a break and reminding yourself what it’s like to go for a walk that isn’t being tracked step by step.

Dr. Jonathon Schmidt

Dr. Schmidt is a board-certified family medicine physician with undergraduate degrees in Microbiology and medicine from Southern Illinois University and the University of Illinois. He completed his residency at St. Joseph Regional Medical Center in South Bend, IN and has a passion for putting his patients first in his practice. In his free time, Dr. Schmidt enjoys spending time with his family and participating in outdoor activities such as water sports and woodworking.

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