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Chapter 1: What are the different types of wearables discussed?
Show Me The Science with Professor Luke O'Neill. A Newstalk Original Podcast. Hello, Luke O'Neill here, and welcome to Show Me The Science. Now, this week, it's a request that's come in, actually, from a friend of mine, someone called Mark, who said to me recently, would you ever do the science of smart watches?
Now, he suggested this because he himself has a smart watch, and I myself got a Garmin recently, full disclosure, and it turns out that 40% of Irish people use some kind of a smart watch. Isn't that amazing how many have them now on their wrists?
And there can be smart rings, less common, and they're about to launch a brand new smart ring, actually, called Aurorus in America, which will do all kinds of things. And very often you connect your smartwatch to an app on your phone or a similar device and you can measure all kinds of things about your body. Now, the question is, how do they work? Are they any good?
Are they more trouble than they're worth? And are they useful to people, I suppose, overall?
Chapter 2: How do smartwatches and rings measure health metrics?
Because we can obsess a bit too much about our health, you know. And if you're measuring things like your heart rate, which is one thing they measure, they also measure your level of fitness in terms of your walks and your steps and all that kind of thing. They can measure your lungs in various ways, as I will come back to. And you're looking at this, does it torment you?
Now, some people find it very useful and they can change their exercise regimen or whatever it might be. And as I'll come back to as well, you can sort of use it semi-diagnostically. But one concern is they aren't like real medical devices. So do we sometimes read too much into them? And that's a bit of a debate at the moment.
But these are well-validated things and certain things are very good at measuring and can tell us all kinds of things about our bodies and tell us what's going on. Now, in my case, I've got two watches. I've got one on my left wrist, which is my watch for time, and the other wrist has the smartwatch.
Chapter 3: What role does sleep tracking play in health?
So it's a bit complicated eventually having two watches. And ironically, for some reason, the strap gave me a slight rash. So it took my smartwatch off. It'll go back on again, I suppose. But that was a bit of an ironic thing to happen if you're wearing a smartwatch. Now, the big thing I want to talk about, though, is sleep. Because many people use the smartwatch to monitor their sleep.
And they'll wake up in the morning and go into their app and figure out how many hours sleep they got. And given that sleep is so important for our health, This is important, I suppose, because you want to make sure you're getting a good night's sleep.
And the evidence grows and grows, partly from the use of smartwatches, it must be said, that a good night's sleep is absolutely essential for our health. And a recent study, and again, I'd love to cover the recent stuff, a new study just came out in Nature, the big journal, finds a U-shaped relationship with how long you sleep and markers of ageing.
Chapter 4: How accurate are sleep trackers compared to traditional methods?
Now, we all know a good night's sleep is a good way to keep your complexion fresh. It was called beauty sleep at one time. But it turns out that if you get too little sleep or too much sleep, you age more quickly. Isn't that strange? Both extremes. And what they showed was using the UK Biobank. Now the UK Biobank is an amazing resource in the UK. It's 500,000 people.
They got a lot of them to measure their sleep. And then they measured how quickly they were aging and their biological age versus their chronological age, which I've spoken about before. You may have an age based on your date of birth, but your body might be older. In other words, you're aging a bit more quickly than others, and lots of things can do that.
Chapter 5: What are the potential benefits of using sleep trackers?
In this study, they found that the optimum time on average was between 6.4 hours and 7.8 hours. If you have less than 6.4 or more than 7.8 on average, you're going to be aging a bit more quickly than someone else. Hence the importance of getting a good night's sleep. Now, we all vary. Some people like five hours. Some do like eight or nine. So we're talking averages here.
But the overall average of around eight is 7.8 hours actually. So the average between those two numbers is probably around seven. That might be the optimum time to make sure you aren't aging too fast. So sleep trackers will allow you to know, are you less than 6.4? Are you more than 7.8?
Chapter 6: How can wearables impact our health behaviors?
And then you may well change your habits to try to optimize your number of hours getting asleep. And so people really watch this closely. Now, how does it work? How does an app measure if you're asleep? Well, it measures movement because obviously when you're asleep, you're moving less. It's called photoplethysmography. It'll measure blood flow. There's a little light on the watch.
All these watches have a light that's measuring blood flow through your skin. And that changes when you are asleep as well. These are two ways they measure it. Your heart rate goes down, your breathing changes, and it's a composite.
Chapter 7: What are the limitations and risks of using wearables?
I mean, it's very sophisticated in a way, isn't it? And the algorithm can calculate from all those metrics how long you've been asleep. So it's pretty accurate. And the rings that are now available, they'll measure your skin temperature and even blood pressure. And that changes as you sleep as well. So are they any good at this? It turns out they're very good. So when you see the data,
on your sleep from your smartwatch. It's pretty accurate, actually, right? And they did this scientifically. They compared it to the normal way of measuring sleep, which is sticking electrodes on your brain.
Chapter 8: What future developments can we expect in wearable technology?
And this is the old-fashioned way of measuring sleep and a number of hours of sleep based on brain activity. And lo and behold, they were very accurate. They were at least 90% accurate. Isn't that interesting to see? So when you do see it, And the readout from the app on your smartphone, it's pretty accurate. And there's a number of hours you have been asleep.
Now, obviously, you can also measure things like time when you go to bed. It registers that total sleep duration when you wake up because these things change in the night. So you get an overall composite of all these things. And then you get a bit of data to say how much sleep you have had and how much quality that sleep was.
And of course, if you're waking up every 20 minutes, it isn't great because you're moving around and you're not getting a good night's sleep. So the final thing it tells you then is probably pretty accurate. Now, remember, when I have it on my wrist, it tells me I don't get enough sleep, but I only need about five to six hours a night.
That's my optimum, you know, and this moves towards the average. So because I'm actually below average, it's going to say you need more sleep, but I don't. So again, you need to just be careful how you interpret this data, I suppose, is the overall idea. With me, I was able to follow my sleep over the course of two weeks, and I do only need about six hours a night, which is my optimum time then.
And you can adjust it then to say, look, that's my particular optimum sleep pattern, so don't be giving out to me. If it's less than that or more than that is the idea overall here. Now, what it's not able to do is give the different stages of sleep. Now, a very important part of sleep is REM, rapid eye movement.
Now, we all need periods of REM, because it turns out that's especially beneficial to us. And the wearables, but what the smartwatches, weren't that accurate, about 50% accurate, because again, they could measure REM using the more traditional electrode-based approaches as well. And it turns out the watch wasn't that good at spotting it half the time, I suppose it did spot it. which isn't bad.
And they're getting better with these numbers all the time. So I can't really tell you much about REM accurately, but it can tell you the quality overall of your sleep and how much time you've been asleep. So it's useful for that. And, you know, a device might say you've had 40 minutes of deep sleep based on REM, but it won't be that accurate. That's one thing to watch for.
Now, all this basis and all this data that we're getting, does it help people sleep better? Because they've looked at this as well. And the answer is overall, yes. So 55% of Americans, America was the first to do all this, who said that they use sleep trackers, said they changed their behavior and tried to get more sleep. So over half the people using it said it brought them benefits.
And that might mean going to bed earlier. Usually that'll be the main thing or staying a bit later. I'm trying making sure you're not on your phone all through the night or getting distracted by reading. Try to go back to sleep if you wake up and they try to improve their sleep.
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