In this excellent article (in French) ‘and if tomorrow your watch was to replace your shrink‘, the potential benefits of wearables and ongoing monitoring to deal medically with psychological issues is highlighted.
In particular for people with borderline psychological troubles, feedback from smartwatches and other wearables depending on the location, situation, ambient noise and physiological factors such as heart rate could be a nice way to deal with excessive anxiety and other difficult situations.
And it would provide 24/7 monitoring, not just more or less frequent encounters with a psychologist.
When I searched for a picture for this post about smartwatches I could almost only find pictures of people doing some form of sport. But in the very next future, these devices and their monitoring capability will find their way in our daily lives and may be coupled with personalized feedback systems that might intervene in certain situations.
Of course on some aspects this might seem a bit annoying to be monitored continuously, on the other hand as any new technology we will need some time to tame it and learn how to live with it, taking the benefits and avoiding the shortcomings.
