Real-time health sensors give us the ability to continually monitor our health, but little is ever said about the unwanted by-product of that ability: anxiety, reports The Independent.

You could see it as a newer form of the cyberchondria: we want to amass more information about our bodies, but too much of that information is disorientating.

That disorientation has been likened to the unsettled feeling people get when they're in hospital and hear alarms going off. These alarms are inevitably equated with something bad happening – but health monitoring is, by its very nature, alert city.

Real-time analysis from a wearable might suddenly advise you to drink some water, take some medicine or run about for a bit, but we can easily become slaves to these new signals that we've become inundated with. "Look! The numbers have changed! I must do something!" Because these numbers are linked to our physical well-being, we're bound to be fascinated by them, but this process of continuous assessment isn't always helpful; they're just indicators, after all, and interpreting them isn't always easy.

So the more numbers there are, the more we will rely on software to alert us to worrying outliers and the more we will worry about alarms that we might have missed.

Much like the security cameras that are sold on late-night shopping channels by earnest presenters promising that this is the only way for you to properly protect your home and your family, health-related wearable devices tend to come with a "peace of mind" guarantee – but in many cases they provide the exact opposite.

Maybe, as the technology develops, we'll learn to regard the numbers they generate with a kind of weary nonchalance. But in these early stages we're thinking of them as a passport to immortality, when they're often just a pathway to anxiety.

bbabo.Net