Tech & Our Health: The Most Smartwatch Obsessed Places in The UK

A far stretch from a pedometer, smartwatches are predicted to become essentials in our modern lives. Helping us to monitor our health and stress levels 24/7, smartwatches can give us a better understanding of our wellbeing and let us know when it's time to get moving or take a break.

A new study by Allied Market Research has predicted that the smartwatch market will reach $96.31 billion globally by 2027 at 19.6% CAGR (compound annual growth rate). With the pandemic massively boosting the market.

To see where the UK is ahead of the crowd with the smartwatch trend, we studied the search habits of every place in the UK to reveal the most and least smartwatch obsessed towns and cities across the country. 

Can smartwatches tell you if you have coronavirus?

Whilst smartwatches are not medical devices, academic studies from institutions including Mount Sinai Health System in New York and Stanford University in California have revealed that Fitbits, Apple Watches and other smartwatches are successfully detecting presymptomatic coronavirus using symptoms such as small changes in a heartbeat.

While they’re a long way from being certified to providing an accurate diagnosis, it does show the possible benefits of incorporating them into our everyday lives. 

Whilst people might associate smartwatches such as Fitbits with physical health, this is a key signifier that they can accurately alert users of mental wellbeing fluctuations as well. 

For example, studies have found that smartwatches are successfully able to detect stress by identifying a raised heartbeat over the course of a couple of hours. More information on the study by Stanford Medicine can be found here.

Where in the UK is Most Smartwatch Obsessed 

To discover the most and least health-conscious places in the UK we looked at monthly Google searches for the term “smartwatch” in over 600 places across the UK. 

To obtain accurate final rankings, proportionate to the population of each location, we calculated the total number of searches per capita to avoid a larger population skewing the results.

Here are the findings:

Top 10 Most Smartwatch Obsessed Places

Bottom 10 Least Smartwatch Obsessed Places

Smartwatch Search History in the UK

We wanted to share the search trend data we found on smartwatches because of how clear it is that they’ve been a go-to way to spend ‘Christmas money’ for UK residents. The peaks on the graph happen at the end of every December, after the 25th, as people are preparing for a healthier new year. 

Interestingly, the data from the past 5 years show that as a general trend searches in recent years have decreased overall. But this isn’t to say that smartwatches haven’t increased in popularity, it’s just that there are more brands to choose from so searches for “Fitbit” are increasingly fragmented.