Is Big Tech Catching on to Digital Wellness?
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Technology use can easily overtake your life if you’re not careful. Between emails, notifications, pings, and buzzes, it’s not hard to spend all day on your phone—and people are getting sick of it.
Wired explained the problem pretty well in a recent article: “Technology's advances used to receive unadulterated exaltation; these days, the promises have gone sour, the optimism dried up. Our devices have never been more powerful, and people have never been so desperate to escape them through ‘digital detoxes’ and so-called ‘dumb phones.’ Unplugging is the rallying call of our time. Turn off, tune out, drop out.”
Some tech companies have noticed the direction of these online conversations, and they’ve started trying to get ahead of the curve. A few of the giants have introduced a host of new digital wellness apps and functions--but can they deliver?
Let’s take a look at some of them.
In 2018, Google rolled out a suite of features for its Android phones that promise to help users cut down on screen time, minimize interruptions and distractions, and improve interactions with others. They include a feature that tells you how much time you’ve spent on your phone, which apps you were using, and when you used them. Here’s a link from Google’s site to help you figure out how to enable those features on your own phone.
Like a lot of other apps, though, these features can be overridden, which means you still have to have some self control and investment in breaking your bad habits. This isn’t going to lock your phone once you’ve exceeded a certain amount of time on it (though one feature can, at least, lock you out of certain apps).
Apple
Last year, Apple also rolled out a range of options for people seeking to improve their digital wellness. Apple’s features were focused on distractions caused by notifications, so they’ve built new functions to limit when and how notifications are shown to users, such as muting notifications in the middle of the night or first thing in the morning. It also has the Screen Time app, which monitors your app usage much like the Google feature discussed above.
Wearable Devices
Wearable devices have been on the scene for a while now (one of our team members was even an early Fitbit owner, back in 2011). At first, they were little more than glorified pedometers with better analytics, but that’s changed over time. Now wearables can track heart rate, stairs climbed, distance swam, and even body composition. At the same time, several other companies have gotten into the wearables game, and there’s now some stiff competition.
But can the wearables help improve your relationship with your tech? Maybe. Some of them, like the relatively new Garmin Vivosmart 4, will track whether your pulse rate is elevated above a threshold level for an extended period of time when you’re not active, indicating you’re stressed out, and will initiate a calm-down breathing exercise. Many of them, like all of the Fitbit, will give you hourly reminders to get up and move so that you don’t sit staring at a screen for too long and damage your eyesight.
But they can’t actually make you be more active, just like the phone apps can’t force you to turn off your phone. That motivation still has to come from inside. That’s why we love having accountability partners, because it helps give you the impetus to keep moving that an app or a device just can’t do.
So go grab yourself a buddy, make a commitment to each other, and start doing something together to improve your lives.
Have you found digital wellness devices helpful? What do you use? Share with us in the comments!