What if wearables could understand your mental health just as well as your physical wellbeing? Is tracking steps the same thing as measuring stress? Even before the Covid-19 pandemic turned the workplace upside down, the World Health Organisation was pushing for businesses to invest in mental health, stating that depression and anxiety have a significant impact on the global economy. Technology has a role to play, be it teletherapy or even using physiological measurements to offer an insight into the different kinds of stressors and how they impact us. The digital health market is also growing exponentially, with devices by the dozen being released that offer innovative metrics to make them stand out. Fitbit’s new Sense smartwatch is one of the first wearables that has the ability to measure the body’s response to stress using biometric data.

“There are two different approaches to stress that we’ve taken,” says Fitbit research scientist Dr Samy Abdel-Ghaffar. “We have an electrodermal activity or EDA sensor, which gives you a momentary snapshot of where you’re at. You simply put your palm over the device and what it is actually doing is measuring little waves of sweat that are imperceptible to you, but indicate that your sympathetic nervous system is more active. And then we have our daily stress management score, which uses data from your sleep and over the last week – so steps, activity, your heart rate – to get a snapshot of how physically stressed you’ve been.”