Has your smartwatch recently notified you that you are not getting enough sleep or your heart rate is abnormally high? Beware: she is not the best adviser on your health, warn two specialists contacted by The duty.
Sébastien Marin, a family physician in the emergency room at Barrie Memorial Hospital, said on Tuesday on Twitter of a diagnosis that he poses more and more often: a defective Apple Watch.
We’ve had a new diagnosis in the emergency department for some time.
“Defective Apple Watch”
Lots of people come very stressed because their Apple Watch indicates heart rates at 140 bpm but when you measure it, it’s 60 ????????♂️
— Sebastien Marin (@SebMarinMD) July 12, 2022
“People who come to the emergency room to wait six hours after having received an indication from their watch, I have seen them often in the last two or three months”, says the Dr Marine. He cites as an example a watch that would indicate a blood oxygen saturation that is too low or heartbeats that are too fast. “People start to be scared if they feel like their heart rate isn’t right,” notes the doctor, who says he reassures them as much as possible.
If in doubt, the best option is to watch for possible symptoms or measure your heart rate at the pharmacy before resorting to the health system, he notes.
Sleep is no exception
Smartwatches also give information about the sleep cycle of their users. And here too, these indications can cause problems.
“You have to put a grain of salt on the reliability of these watches, which is modest”, indicates the Dr Milan Nigam, neurologist and somnologist at the Sacré-Coeur hospital in Montreal. He, too, says he’s seeing more and more patients worried about their smartwatch warnings. “As a sleep doctor, I can only be happy that people are more interested in it. They want to equip themselves to know how to improve it, but there can be perverse effects to that. »
He mentions, for example, a watch that would tell a person that they have not slept enough, which can cause them to stay in bed longer, even if they are not sleeping. “But when you stretch the duration of sleep over a longer period, the sleep is going to be of lower quality,” he explains. In the long term, these indications can therefore lead to “detrimental” behavior in some people.
This obsessive quest for perfect sleep even has a name: orthosomnia. “It happens when we become too preoccupied and anxious about our sleep,” he says, adding that smartwatch indications can become a source of anxiety.
His advice for people who believe they have a sleep problem? Consult their doctor. ” Technologies [des montres intelligentes] are not so bad to give an approximation of the duration of our sleep, but it remains modest compared to what we can do in a laboratory. »