You’ve just got a shiny new smartwatch and are beaming with excitement, looking forward to trying out all the features it offers. But did you know that the health data contained in your wearable gadget could open a can of worms?

With the advent of wearable technology – and the promise that it will become mainstream within the next few years – comes advanced health monitoring that can let you know exactly how your body is performing. But, in time, could that same data be used to prove how well – or unwell – you are to third parties?

Wearable devices, such as the Apple Watch, Microsoft Band, Samsung Galaxy Gear S, Fitbit and several others, are still in their early days, but are increasingly becoming desirable. They pack technology that comes with powerful sensors that can track how many steps and how much exercise you have done, how well and long you have slept, how stressed you are, your blood pressure, your exposure to the sun and even what you have eaten.

How far off are we from this? Not as far as you may think. Apple is clearly heading into the health and fitness industry with its new watch and the HealthKit software application now integrated with its iOS 8 operating system. Microsoft Band and the Microsoft Health software tracks your health and fitness levels from data gathered from fitness devices and apps you use every day.

So in future could wearables be used by third parties as more than just a simple tool for telling if you’ve pulled a sickie? Let’s look at some of the possible scenarios.

Health insurance and patient monitoring

What if private health insurance companies follow the car insurance industry, where the monitoring of one’s driving performance affects their insurance premium. Similarly, every health infraction – such as a hen or stag night, Saturday night takeaway or Netflix movie marathon on the sofa – could increase your health premium.Surely that’s not possible? Well, let’s look at the technology behind wearables. Most of them come packed with sensors that can track where you’ve been (GPS), how much exercise you’ve done (pedometer and heart-rate sensor) and how stressed you are (galvanic skin response and temperature sensor). Some apps for wearable devices can even track what you have eaten (blood glucose monitoring). Glucose monitoring is the most alarming of all and the holy grail for health professionals and insurers because of the insights it could give into what you have eaten.

On the one hand, this sounds like a Big Brother scenario, but on the other, there may be benefits for people who are taking care of their parents or children, especially if they have chronic health conditions. For instance, if caring for a relative with dementia, wearable technology can prove useful in being able to tell how they are feeling, whether they’ve eaten, if they have taken their medicine or whether they have wandered off.

Employee wellbeing programmes

This scenario is a lot closer than we may think as several companies have started piloting corporate wellness programmes. Large companies such as BP are providing employees with free wearable devices provided they share their health and fitness data with the company. The more physically active (as measured by the pedometer sensor) the employees are, the lower the company’s insurance premium gets.

However, let’s stop and think for a moment what may happen if additional data such as sleep patterns – which are now available on wearable devices – is shared by measuring not only how many hours you sleep, but how deeply you do so based on your heart rate and movement when asleep. To take things further, what if the same data can be used to infer how active you’ve been in the bedroom too?

Where do you stand on this?

Although health and fitness wearables are currently offered to employees on an opt-in basis, how long will it be until they become mandatory? And if third parties can access your data, where does this stop? What if being granted a visa to visit a country requires access to your health and fitness data?

Health technology wearables offer potential benefits when it comes to patient health monitoring – for example, in Alzheimer’s patients. However, there is a thin line when it comes to employee and health insurance activity tracking, where there is a danger of wearable data being used to discriminate against people and marking the end of privacy. We therefore need to be vigilant so that we don’t open a Pandora’s box that gives rise to a future where our wearables are spying on us and health data monitoring becomes the norm.

Emmanuel Tsekleves is a researcher at Lancaster University

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