A button that tells your boss you're unhappy: why mental health wearables could be bad news at work

With gyms closed and millions cooped up and restless at home, it’s little wonder that “healthtech” is now being billed as the next big battleground over which the likes of Microsoft, Apple and Google will fight. Chief among their products are wearable devices that measure your heart rate, your step count, and dozens of other data points that keep you informed about your physical health.

The increasing prevalence of these devices is to be welcomed. They help people track their workouts, setting quantifiable goals that can help them stay fit and healthy.

But the introduction of wearables that measure our mental health – like employee mood tracker “Moodbeam” – should be greeted with a more cautious optimism. Such devices will, after all, hold some of our most personal data – and constantly logging our emotional state might even be counterproductive in helping us achieve better mental health.

The wearables boom

Wearables are now commonplace in people’s lives. The wearable technology market is currently valued at US$37 billion (£26.9 billion) and is forecast to grow to include 1 billion connected wearable devices by 2022. People value the ability to measure their health and performance, using “health indicators” like their heart rate to better plan workouts and fitness routines.

Wearables contribute to the “quantified-self” movement, which sees us use technology to collect and process more and more data about our lives in the hopes of optimising our behaviour. This movement has already spread into the workplace, with office workers now granted data showing them how long they spend sitting down during working hours. And now, companies on the hunt for the next big health indicator have landed on our mental health – a particular concern to emerge during the ongoing pandemic.

Beyond the workplace, it’s unclear whether the “OK or not OK” approach promoted by Moodbeam is the right one for mental health monitoring. Emotionally literate individuals are able to understand and express a wide spectrum of emotions, many of which may resist grouping into a binary choice of “OK” or “not OK”. And, if users are constantly pressured to judge their emotions, logging some as negative could lead to negative mental health impacts. Put simply: feeling bad about feeling bad can make you feel even worse.

Moodbeam is yet to publish any data on user engagement and implementation. It’ll be important to see and examine this data, now that wellbeing trackers are looking likely to become another household health indicator – to determine if they’ll be helpful for users, or a sinister form of surveillance for employers.

In the meantime, companies deciding to employ wearables like Moodbeam must give careful consideration to what they do with mood data, and how they plan to use it to actively help their employees. And individual users should engage with this new technology with caution: it may help them map their moods more effectively, but it could also lead them to feel worse about their wellbeing in the long run.

Maxine Whelan, Assistant Professor - Centre for Intelligent Healthcare, Coventry University; Celine Brookes-Smith, PhD Researcher - Centre for Intelligent Healthcare, Coventry University, and Natalie Bisal, PhD Researcher, Centre for Intelligent Healthcare, Coventry University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.