The smartphone is only just a little over a decade old. Quickly followed by tablets and then, more recently, smartwatches, a series of connected devices is now the norm for many.
If you’re wearing a smartwatch you could be using it for all manner of things – answering calls, checking messages quickly or tracking activity. But there’s a whole host of data your watch may well already have that you might not even be using yet.
Table of Contents
Your Sleep Habits
Many Smartwatches have the hardware required to track sleep effectively. Some have an inbuilt application to do this, while you can download apps to do this if yours doesn’t.
If you wear your watch to bed, you could find out easily:
- How many hours you are sleeping
- The quality of that sleep
- Your heart rate while you sleep
This is all vital in assessing whether your sleep is of the quality and quantity you need to maintain good overall health.
Your Activity Levels
Many of use a basic pedometer. But your activity is more than just the steps you take. And modern smartwatches have the ability to track all sorts of activity:
- The amount of time you spend standing versus sitting
- Your heart rate during various types of activity
- Estimated calorie burn based on your movement and heart rate
Your Resting Heart Rate
Many smartwatches track your heart rate all day long. This means you have access to information about your heart rate for the whole time you wear the watch. As your resting heart rate is a key factor in a picture of your cardiovascular health, this data is valuable. And while most doctors will conduct tests of their own in the event of a problem, a record of such information could be really useful should you ever need to seek advice for heart related issues.
What it can’t tell you!
It’s amazing to have so much information to hand and the capabilities of our technology are only improving with time. But of course, no hardware can yet give us a picture of our internal health. That said, innovative companies like Forth with Life provide customers with home blood tests and an intuitive, informative dashboard of results they can access on smartphones. This brings the missing piece of the puzzle directly to your mobile device.
