A new study may have found a link between smartwatches and anxiety

It’s no secret that Apple sells the Apple Watch based in part on its life-saving abilities. In at least two different ads, the company has suggested, not at all discreetly, that if people weren’t wearing an Apple Watch they would have died.

Features like automatically calling emergency services after a car crash or a fall go a long way towards keeping people safe, but the preventative health features for identifying chronic cardiovascular health problems can be just as much, if not more impactful, and they’ve proliferated across the smartwatch landscape since Apple started pushing them.

“Wearable Devices, Health Care Use, and Psychological Well‐Being in Patients With Atrial Fibrillation,” a new study published in the Journal of the American Heart Association found that widespread wearable use might not only be a positive thing, however. In particular, for patients with atrial fibrillation (AFib), an irregular heartbeat in the upper chambers of the heart, wearing a smartwatch may even increase the stress and anxiety caused by their condition, and put even greater demands on the healthcare system.

Sorting through the data

What do you do with all the things your watch tells you?

Apple

The amount of raw data smartwatches collect naturally leads to questions, according to Lindsey Rosman, Ph.D, one of the researchers behind the study and an Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Division of Cardiology at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine.

“I have a clinic one day per week where I see patients who are referred to me from our cardiology providers. And over the course of several years, we just kept noticing that folks were coming in with lots of questions and lots of concerns about information they were getting from their wearable devices,” Dr. Rosman says.

Those concerned patients led Dr. Rosman and her colleagues to conduct a case study investigating the issue, which revealed a similar trend. “So we wanted to get a bigger sample and better understand whether folks who use wearables may have more anxiety about their heart and their device than folks who aren’t using wearables,” she says.

Smartwatches provide a lot of information with little context, something that itself can be stressful, and according to Dr. Rosman, “patients with cardiovascular conditions have a higher rate of anxiety than people who don’t have a cardiovascular condition.” Explaining what could be causing that stress and anxiety makes it easier to avoid, and could prevent putting even more demands on the healthcare system helping these patients.

Related

What is Apple Watch ECG? Advice to set up your heart health features

Everything you need to know about Apple’s ECG heart feature, including its limitations.

Connecting smartwatch ownership to healthcare use

The study Dr. Rosman and her colleagues constructed ultimately connected information from electronic health records (EHR) and multiple surveys and questionnaires to analyze 172 different AFib patients, 83 of which owned and or used a smartwatch.

How these patients were accessing and using the healthcare system both formally (appointments, procedures, etc.) and informally (patient portal messages, doctor calls, etc.), along with a psychological profile were established, and statistical analysis was applied to the results.

Using the survey data, Dr. Rosman’s team was able to identify when a smartwatch was purchased and how a patient’s healthcare usage changed after they started using a watch. There are some limitations, of course: The reason why these patients purchased a wearable in the first place is unknown and there could be selection bias in the sense that the study included wearable users who might have already been overly concerned with their heart. But the findings published in the study are still illuminating.

How these patients were accessing and using the healthcare system both formally (appointments, procedures, etc.) and informally (patient portal messages, doctor calls, etc.), along with a psychological profile were established, and statistical analysis was applied to the results.

Related

4 Apple Health app features you don’t need a smartwatch for

An Apple Watch isn’t the only way Apple users can track and develop healthy habits. This built-in iPhone app is effective and easy to use.

Wearable users were also far more likely to use informal healthcare resources, including sending significantly more messages to their healthcare providers than patients without wearables. According to Dr. Rosman, those kinds of messages and calls “can be very time-consuming for providers and are typically not reimbursable hours.” That kind of extra work can have a significant impact on doctors and contribute to higher levels of burnout over time.