HOW TO DO DATA RIGHT

THE DELUGE WEARABLES OF NUMBERS FROM YOUR CAN TELL YOU A LOT-BUT NOT EVERYTHING. READ WHAT YOU NEED. OPTIMISE YOUR LIFE.

- CHRISTIE ASCHWANDEN

IF SOMEONE ASKS YOU, "How are you doing?" and you feel the need to pull up your tracker app, we get you. Humanity has entered the golden age of health and fitness tracking. Everybody wears a tracker now, whether strapped around the wrist or cuffed around a finger. The global tracker industry was already worth R708 billion in 2021, and it is forecast to grow to more than R2.3 trillion by 2028. A legion of companies-Garmin, Fitbit, Samsung, Oura, Huawei and so many more advertise wearables that promise to quantify everything from heart rate and stress level to metabolic rate, fitness level, recovery status and sleep quality.

And that promise is alluring: if you can track it, you can improve it, these brands argue. Except that some experts are now seeing the symptoms of over tracking. "One risk of all this measuring is that you become so obsessed with metrics that you forget the reasons you're out there-things like recreation, fun, hanging out with your buddies," says Dr. Michael J. Joyner, a human-physiology researcher at the Mayo Clinic. Even sleep is no refuge, because you feel pressure to attain a high sleep score.