An over-reliance on smartwatches that monitor health metrics may be doing more harm than good, a leading psychiatrist has said.
From measuring the quality of your sleep to prompting you to move more, many smartwatches brand themselves as health-promoting technology.
However, an Irish psychiatrist has warned that there is no benefit to constant health monitoring.
On Newstalk Breakfast, Trinity College Psychiatry Professor Brendan Kelly said the amount of data produced by smartwatches "can only generate health anxiety and obsessive monitoring".
"This continuous tracking of these metrics makes people over-concerned with very minor fluctuations in data - which are sometimes misinterpreted as health issues" Prof Kelly said.
A woman wearing a smartwatch takes a break from exercising, Alamy."We do not need to have continuous tracking of our heart rate, our blood oxygen, our ECG, our blood pressure, our steps or our temperature.
"This is unnecessary and it only leads to anxiety and obsessive behaviour."
Prof Kelly said there is no evidence to suggest that it is beneficial to achieve a certain number of steps every day.
"It is important to be moderately active over the course of a week - but it is not useful to monitor this day to day," he said.
Sleep
While many smartwatches monitor sleep and sleep quality, Prof Kelly said this can occasionally lead to more problems with sleep.
"People [are] monitoring their sleep patterns to an obsessive degree - to the degree that it can result in something called orthosomnia," he said.
"[This happens] when people are so pre-occupied with achieving perfect sleep that they can’t get to sleep."
An obsession with sleep is unhealthy, Prof Kelly said.
"Sleep is very good and we should prioritise it in our lives - but we cannot measure it as precisely or usefully as these watches appear to suggest we can," he said.
Prof Kelly said some the obsessive use of smartwatches with sleep monitoring technology can "diminish" sleep quality.
Feature image shows a person checking a smartwatch, Alamy
