When my phone started judging me

How the consumer wearable market turned subjective stress into objective metricsI never bought an Oura Ring. I did not need to. My Samsung was already in my handbag, quietly keeping score. I cannot remember the exact moment I began checking my steps. There was no solemn decision to become healthier, no New Year promise and certainly no dramatic purchase of a wearable device. One day, I opened Samsung Health and found a number waiting for me. It had been counting. At first, this felt useful, almost charming. There was something satisfying about discovering that an ordinary day contained several thousand steps. Walking to the car counted. Moving between meetings counted. Searching for something I had misplaced for the third time counted. Even journalism, a profession largely performed while sitting down and promising oneself to stand up soon, apparently involved some movement. However, the number quickly stopped being a record of my day and became a verdict on it. On busy days, when I had written several stories, answered endless messages and survived on coffee, my phone could still announce that I had taken only 2,846 steps. Professionally productive, perhaps. Physically, according to my Android, I had barely participated in life. This is the quiet power of health data. A number looks objective, and objectivity is difficult to argue with. I might have spent the day thinking, worrying, rushing and working, but none of that appeared on the graph. The graph recorded footsteps, not effort. Soon, I began adjusting my behaviour. I took longer routes through supermarkets. I parked slightly farther away. At home, I sometimes carried my phone from room to room because walking without it had begun to feel administratively pointless. If the phone remained on the table, the steps disappeared from the official record. I had walked them, but nothing official had happened. There is something absurd about pacing around a flat at night because a screen says the day remains incomplete. Still, once a target exists, stopping just short of it feels strangely like failure. A sensible person sees 6,700 steps and thinks she has moved quite a lot. A person trained by an app sees 300 missing steps and starts circling the kitchen. In Cyprus, this becomes particularly ridiculous in July. The pavement is radiating heat, the air feels reheated and every rational instinct is telling us to remain somewhere air-conditioned. Nevertheless, the phone presents the same target with the calm indifference of a manager who does not accept weather-related excuses. To be fair, Cyprus probably does need the reminder. The latest World Health Organisation, (WHO profile), drawing on survey data, found that 63 per cent of people reported no more than 60 minutes of moderate physical activity a week. The problem is not that the app is entirely wrong. It is that a useful observation can slowly become a moral judgement. Nor is this a niche European habit. In 2024, almost one in three EU internet users used a smartwatch, fitness band or similar wearable, according to the latest Eurostat data. We are creating an enormous population of people who can be told, before breakfast, that they slept badly. The famous 10,000-step target illustrates how easily a number acquires authority. It did not emerge from a medical committee after years of clinical research. It came from a Japanese pedometer launched in 1965 called the Manpo-kei, or “10,000-step meter”. As Harvard epidemiologist I-Min Lee explained in a Harvard account, the name was a marketing decision. Six decades later, people are still pacing through their kitchens to satisfy it. The evidence now offers something more forgiving. A major 2025 review, covering 57 studies from more than 10 countries, found that walking 7,000 steps a day was associated with a 47 per cent lower risk of death than walking 2,000. It also linked that level of movement with lower risks of cardiovascular disease, dementia and depressive symptoms. More importantly for those of us who do not always reach even 7,000, benefits appeared much earlier. Moving from 2,000 to around 4,000 steps was already associated with meaningful improvements. Professor Melody Ding, who led the research, said the findings should shift the focus from perfection to progress. That is a healthier instruction than the silent accusation of an unfinished target. A number can reveal how sedentary a working day has become. It can push us outside when we might otherwise move only between a desk, a fridge and a sofa. Sometimes the nudge is exactly what we need. The problem begins when the nudge becomes a judgement. In a five-week Stanford experiment, adults were given Apple Watches. Some saw accurate step counts, while others were shown figures deliberately reduced by 40 per cent. Their real step counts barely changed. Nevertheless, those receiving lower figures began to view themselves as less active and less healthy. They reported more negative emotions, lower self-esteem and poorer mental health, ate less healthily and recorded increases in resting heart rate and blood pressure. Their bodies had not suddenly deteriorated. Only the story told by the screen had changed. European research has found a similar gap between what a device measures and what a person experiences. Researchers from Leiden University and Philipps University Marburg followed almost 800 smartwatch users for three months, comparing the readings with participants’ own reports. The Dutch-led study found minimal overlap between the watches’ stress readings and how participants said they felt. A faster heartbeat could indicate fear, excitement, exercise or sexual arousal. The watch could detect the physiological change, but not the life surrounding it. “We call wearable data in my field ‘objective’ data, but I’m not sure that’s the right label,” Leiden clinical psychologist Eiko Fried said. The researchers concluded that wearable information became more useful when combined with self-reporting rather than treated as a replacement for it. This week, the technology moved further in the opposite direction. On July 22, Samsung unveiled the Galaxy Watch9 and Galaxy Watch Ultra2, describing them as gateways to AI-driven health intelligence. Vitals establishes a personal baseline during sleep from signals including heart rate, respiratory rate, skin temperature and blood oxygen. Other features score cardiovascular wellness, exertion and recovery. The watch does not merely count whether I walked. It wants to explain what the walking means, how well I recovered and what I should do tomorrow. Samsung calls this a proactive health partner. I can also imagine it as an extremely attentive colleague who has completed a wellness course and would like to discuss my performance. Naturally, the small print repeatedly explains that many of these functions are intended for fitness and wellness, not diagnosis or treatment. This creates an odd relationship. The technology is confident enough to score cardiovascular wellness, energy and recovery, but careful enough to remind us that none of those scores constitutes medical advice. Europe recognises that boundary. Germany’s medical regulator explains that software intended only for sport, fitness or wellbeing, without a medical purpose claimed by its manufacturer, is generally not a medical device. EU guidance similarly distinguishes regulated medical software from ordinary health and lifestyle apps. The distinction is legally sensible. Psychologically, it can be harder to maintain when an ordinary wellness app begins presenting information in the language of scores, baselines, warnings and risk. Sleep may be where this relationship becomes most unsettling. A person can wake up feeling rested, look at a poor sleep score and immediately reconsider. Was I tired after all? Did I get enough deep sleep? Why was my REM percentage wrong? Trying hard to sleep, unfortunately, is one of the most reliable ways not to sleep. Researchers have given this fixation a name. Orthosomnia describes the perfectionist pursuit of ideal sleep driven by tracker data. The term emerged from a 2017 case series involving patients who trusted their devices more than their own experience and sometimes spent longer in bed trying to improve their numbers. Nor are the measurements infallible. Consumer trackers infer sleep stages from movement, heart rate and other signals. A clinical sleep laboratory also records brain activity, eye movements and muscle activity. In a 2025 German study at Charite University Medicine Berlin, three smart rings were compared with laboratory polysomnography. The Oura Ring achieved around 85 per cent accuracy when separating sleep from wakefulness. When distinguishing wake, light, deep and REM sleep, however, its accuracy fell to roughly 53 per cent. The researchers warned that reassuring group averages could conceal large errors for individuals. The ring might be broadly right about a room full of people while being considerably wrong about one person on one night. This does not make the devices useless. Long-term information can reveal patterns that memory misses. The danger lies in treating every fluctuation as a revelation. Neurologist Chantale Branson expressed the boundary clearly when discussing trackers with Euronews. “These devices are supposed to help you. And if you feel anxious or worried or frustrated about it, then it’s not helpful,” she said. That sentence should probably appear whenever a health app opens. Because my phone knows many things about me, but not necessarily the things that matter. It knows how many steps I took, but not whether I walked because I was happy, angry or trying to clear my head. It can record that my heart was beating faster, but not whether the reason was exercise, anxiety, love, fear or an email I should never have opened. It measures movement without understanding the life inside it. I have not deleted Samsung Health. That would be too dramatic and, frankly, dishonest. I still check my steps. When the figure is embarrassingly low, I sometimes accept it as a useful reminder to leave the chair and walk. However, I am trying to treat the app as a witness rather than a judge. A missed target is not a failed day. A walk without my phone still happened. Rest does not become laziness because an algorithm cannot reward it, and sleep does not become bad simply because a device says so. When I walk by the sea, my Android can tell me the distance, duration and number of steps. What it cannot tell me is whether I noticed the water, stopped thinking about work or returned home feeling slightly lighter.