Smartwatch Makers Need To Get Health Features Right Or Not Add Them At All
© Nicholas Sutrich / Android Central ZeroPixel Watch and Galaxy Watch now have two very important features to help you monitor your health: AFib (irregular heartbeat) monitoring and SpO2 (blood oxygen saturation) tracking. Maybe these features should have been there at launch, and there's room for that discussion, but I'm more concerned about reliability.
Health monitoring is also important if you are healthy. It's one of those things that you have to do well or not at all.
A smartwatch can be an invaluable tool for monitoring your health. They can track your workouts and remind you to drink water or get out of your chair and monitor your heart rate while doing all those healthy things.
All of these things don't have to be precise. If you walked 9272 steps and your watch says you walked 9304 steps, that's great. If your training rate is 88 and your clock is 93, this is also normal. As long as it's consistent, that's great because you'll notice when something changes.
A wearable's AFib or SpO2 detection isn't something that can go wrong, but I can almost promise it will. Even the equipment at your local hospital has acceptable tolerances and will not always give an accurate reading. However, they must be reliable and consistent.
Unfortunately, I have firsthand experience with this. I am quite healthy as far as my heart is concerned. I'm at the age where I go to the cardiologist for my yearly checkup and he tells me to cut back on red meat and check my cholesterol, but that's okay.
However, this time there is. I was taking a new drug and triggered an episode of paroxysmal atrial fibrillation. It's a reaction that makes you think you'll have a heart attack and die. It's so scary.
Equally scary was how my Galaxy Watch told me everything was fine in the second round of the event as well. Luckily, I lay in a comfortable hospital bed with countless cables plugged into me so that real devices could do real monitoring and real people could interpret the readings.
That is the question. The $300 wearable uses the cheapest parts available to perform functions like heart rate tracking without worrying about accuracy or reliability, and a way to calibrate it. You can't compare it with real (and like all expensive) medical devices.
The manufacturers know this and will even tell you in small print on the product page or at the bottom of the user guide. It's up to us to read and understand it.
If you have neither, I would call. I say you can't rely on cheap bracelets when it comes to your health. It doesn't matter how many articles you've read about lifesaving smartwatches or what the tech moderators are saying about shiny soundstages or bold infographics, it's pretty cool.
Your watch is cheap disposable plastic and all it has to do is convince you to buy it. The rest are just bonuses.
What you can do is assume that the watchmaker is at least consistent with, if not accurate with, trends. If you're in good health and your watch generally shows the same thing, don't worry if your watch tells you something else. If he tells you otherwise twice, see a doctor.
My doctor agrees that a good laptop is both good and bad for your health. The good thing is that they can make people take better care of their health and exercise. Worse, some people think that the literature they see is a substitute for a visit to the doctor once a year.
Don't be one of those people.
