The Science of Wearables
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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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What are the different types of wearables discussed?
0:00–0:59
2
How do smartwatches and rings measure health metrics?
0:59–1:44
3
What role does sleep tracking play in health?
1:44–2:34
4
How accurate are sleep trackers compared to traditional methods?
2:34–3:11
5
What are the potential benefits of using sleep trackers?
3:11–3:48
6
How can wearables impact our health behaviors?
3:48–4:20
7
What are the limitations and risks of using wearables?
4:20–4:50
8
What future developments can we expect in wearable technology?
4:50–13:35