The insect slipped soundlessly past my defenses and carefully bit down on my wrist before making its escape. I would like to say that it left no trace of the attack, but by that point the mosquito didn’t care: the mission was complete and the fact that my wrist swelled up was immaterial. It certainly was material to me and, a result, for the first time in many years, I had to stop wearing my smartwatch. Sure, I could have switched it to my other wrist, but I’m testing a Hume Band on that wrist so I’m out of space. Perhaps because I’m wearing the Band, there seems to be little that the smartwatch does that I have missed so far with one big exception: I miss being able to see what time it is.
Over the years, as I’ve become dependent on my smartwatch I have cut down on the number of digital interfaces in my home. I don’t have an alarm clock in the bedroom – I have Siri for alarms, and my phone charges on the bedside table if I need to see what time it is. Even my oven is free of a digital display (I no longer have the twice a year ritual of changing dumb digital clocks when daylight savings time begins or ends). And now, perhaps temporarily, my wrist is also free from time.
But it doesn’t say much about my smartwatch that time keeping is the main thing I miss. This is a device that is packed full of technology to do almost anything that my phone can do: I clearly under-utilize it. Of course, as I mentioned before, I’m still wearing my Hume Band so I’m tracking all my fitness metrics (or most of them anyway) so I haven’t disconnected from the personal matrix completely.
But I suspect I wouldn’t really miss most of those stats if I were to stop wearing it either. Would you? Stop and think for a moment if you actually change any of your behavior – diet or exercise in particular – because you track your health stats. If the answer is yes, I suspect you are still in your smartwatch honeymoon period having recently purchased it… or are one of the few who truly are committed to health and body - congrats. Take sleep tracking, for example: if your watch tells you it was a rough night, what do you do about it (except to use it as an excuse of being a little grumpy the next day). How do you actually adapt your behaviors to improve the next night’s sleep score? My Hume Band is constantly commenting on my sleep quality, but seems short on advice about fixing the deficit.
Even more to the point, do you believe the results, or just the ones that tell the story you want to hear (see I Dream of Rats)?
This is, of course, heresy. Amongst other hats I wear at Circana’s Connected Intelligence service, I’m a wearables analyst. My job is to wear, nay embrace this technology and understand its many benefits. But what are those benefits really? As I am discovering, the must have benefits are far less than I previously thought and, at least in my case, may be narrowed down to the singularity of time. Sure, notifications would be nice, but having fewer (nay, zero!) notifications on my wrist probably gives me less stress: my health tracking should approve.
Will I strap the smartwatch back on when the insect’s venom has been pushed out of my wrist? Probably, but perhaps not always. I have one incredibly niche use case where the watch is useful: tracking my speed when windsurfing. Again, do the results mean I change anything about how I windsurf? Not really. But it’s fun to know. And I also need to know when it is time to come back into shore.
And perhaps that is the whole point of the smartwatch’s health and fitness tracking: it’s nice to know, even if the results lead to no actionable changes. But the real question is not whether I’ll strap it back on. Rather, the question is whether I buy another one when this smartwatch leaves its mortal coil? That is more doubtful…a $10 watch may be all I need.