AILSA CHANG, HOST:
Maybe you have an Oura Ring or a Whoop band, a Lingo monitor, a Fitbit, a Garmin watch or an Apple Watch. Maybe you have one or many of these wearable devices that can constantly track your vital statistics. Well, Adam Clark Estes of Vox has a new story out titled "I Covered My Body In Health Trackers For Six Months. It Ruined My Life." Adam is here with us now to tell us all about his ruined life. Hello.
ADAM CLARK ESTES: Hi.
CHANG: So why did you do this, Adam?
ESTES: That's a great question, and I continue to ask myself that question now that the experiment is over. But long story short, I am getting older. I'm feeling older. And I wondered what kind of technology could help me feel better. And once I started looking, I kind of didn't stop, and I started trying everything. And I did it all at once, and then I wrote about it 'cause that's my job.
CHANG: OK, so at the peak moment, how many devices were attached to your body, would you say?
ESTES: I probably maxed out at six or seven devices. Let's say it was a Whoop band on one wrist, an Apple Watch on the other, maybe two to three rings on and one or two continuous glucose monitors plugged right into my arm.
CHANG: Adam likes to accessorize. OK. So you found positive and negative outcomes from this whole experiment. Let's just start with the positive. When did these devices actually help you feel better or healthier?
ESTES: They worked best for me when I was asleep. It was the sleep tracking that I actually found made me adopt better habits, get to sleep earlier, sleep more, wake up the next day. And even getting a score that told me how well or poorly I slept somehow made me feel better.
CHANG: Oh, OK. On the other hand, you did say that as you were tracking, you know, your hours of sleep, the number of steps you were taking, your glucose levels, all of that information started making you anxious. Tell us how.
ESTES: Health trackers are designed to collect information about you and give you more insight into how your body is doing. But if you don't have a question you're trying to answer or you don't have a way to kind of interpret that data into actionable items in your life, I found it to be really overwhelming. I didn't know what to do when I was told that my heart rate variability was dropping, which I was told was bad.
The most anxiety-inducing data came from the continuous glucose monitor. This is one of the newest health trackers on the market for over-the-counter use. People with diabetes have been using them for years. And it's just not clear to me what to do with that data. And I certainly didn't know what to do when I was told that my blood glucose was spiking after I ate, which is, by the way, a totally normal thing for your blood sugar to do.
CHANG: So I just want to kind of step back and ask this larger question. Like, why do you think the market for all these health trackers is getting so hot right now? Like, what do you think is going on with all of us?
ESTES: In the United States, it's well established that we have kind of a health care problem. We have a problem with access to health insurance. We have a problem with access to health care. So it's no surprise that people might want to get some more information elsewhere, and these devices are becoming increasingly powerful, especially with the help of AI, and they're becoming a lot cheaper.
CHANG: Right. So do you see a future where everyone has a smartwatch, not exactly because of health concerns, but just because the tech becomes more convenient to get, more affordable, you know, like with smartphones, and we just have to get used to having all of our activity levels tracked all the time, that that becomes just the new reality?
ESTES: I really, really hope that wearing a health tracker continues to be optional. I hope that people can take them off and feel better, but I do think that there is some promise here in these devices helping to, at the very least, kind of serve as a check engine light for people. If you're wearing a health tracker and something goes wrong - the Oura Ring will do this. It has something called the Symptoms Radar. It told me I was getting sick. And sure enough, about a day later, I got sick.
There are a lot of positive things that can come out of wearing a health tracker, and I do think it will become more popular. The tech will get cheaper. It will continue to get better. But what I learned from my experiment is sometimes the thing that made me feel the best was taking it off and just listening to my body.
CHANG: Adam Clark Estes, senior technology correspondent at Vox. Thank you so much.
ESTES: Thank you.
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