The age of the wearable is fast upon us, and many of the new products we’re going to see in the next 12 months will be all about health and happiness. The New York Times recently predicted that soon some wearables will seamlessly blend in by looking like a skin-coloured sticking plasters and even perhaps become fashion items. There are also lots of new apps in this area too.

I’ll be trying some out over the next few months but here are six that have come across my desk: one hand-held, two wearables and three apps that can help you calm down, straighten up, and take a deep breath.

One hand-held

PIP: It may not technically be a wearable – since it’s hand-held rather than worn – but PIP monitors electrical changes on your skin and uses the data to measure your level of stress. It then trains you to relax by using biofeedback techniques delivered via two mobile apps on iOS and Android. You hold the PIP between your finger and thumb as you play one of two games: “The Loom” challenges you to “use your powers of relaxation to turn winter into summer” by consciously reducing your stress levels until the Loom landscape alters to reflect your inner calmness, when “snow and ice thaw, leaves begin to shoot and flowers bloom”, says the company. In “Relax and Race”, your stress level is used to determine your speed in the race – the more you relax, the faster you go. Strange but true.

Two wearables

Lumo Lift: If you’re a sloucher, this discreet item could help you straighten up. It looks like a small square brooch, but it’s much more than jewellery. The device tracks your posture, the number of steps you take, the distance you’ve travelled, and the calories you’ve consumed. But its main job is to remind you to sit or stand up straight by emitting gentle vibrations when required. Better than a grumpy relative yelling “stop slumping”. It’s available on iOS only, but a desktop app for Windows 7+ and Mac computers with Bluetooth 4.0 capabilities are promised soon, with Android to follow later.

Spire: Spire calls its device a “stone”, giving it an aura of having come from nature, but actually it’s made of steel and plastic, as you would expect. It clips onto your clothes somewhere close to your body – a belt, or a bra strap for example – and watches the way you breathe. Then it analyses the data in real time and feedback prompts you to alter your behaviour in that moment. Here’s the kind of advice it gives: “A slow, deep breath is the simplest, most concrete thing you can do to change your health and performance.”

It can be used in many different situations, including yoga practice, meditation, and sleep, as well as the usual daily activities. The company says it offers “activity tracking for body and mind” and it ships with its own charging pad. Like Lumo Lift, this is current only available for iOS, with Android to follow.

And three apps

Here are two very different apps designed to raise your happiness levels.

Happiness by Design: September saw the publication of the book, “Happiness by Design”, a study of the measurement of happiness and its causes and consequences by Paul Dolan, professor of behavioural science at the London School of Economics. Dolan discusses ways to do more of the things that bring us pleasure and purpose and, perhaps, make our days and lives more worthwhile. There’s also an app for this – two in fact – that appear to have been developed to put the research into practice: HBD Measure helps you identify the activities in your life that you find to be the most worthwhile, what they are and who you do them with. HBD Monitor allows you to track and log much more information to build up a bigger picture of your day-to-day life and worthwhile feelings and happiness.

Kindly: “We all get stuck at times” says Kindly, so why not “gain a fresh perspective by chatting with helpful people who enjoy lending their ears?” Choose the topic you want to talk about and they will match you with a kind person for a 15-minute anonymous chat session via the app. Or if you see yourself as more of a listener, you can lend an ear when you have some spare time. And if you discover a promising interaction, you can send a friend request. iOS only.

One other app that I thought interesting still hasn’t materialised. iOS 8 users waiting for Apple’s much-vaunted HealthKit platform will have to wait a little longer. It has a bug. Let’s hope it’s not measles.

We must all now be very familiar with complaints about how the hours we spend glued to our devices eat into family time and other meaningful relationships. Stories range from children who’d rather play with phones than eat at the table (for which there’s an app to lock them out at mealtimes) to addictions in the making and ones that “threaten the very fabric of society”.

Locking away your phone may be the answer for some, and at the moment we can’t be sure whether our use of digital devices will have a positive or negative effect on our health, but isn’t it more about being smart about how you use them?

While VisitScotland took the opportunity to sell poor mobile reception as a great time to experience the “novelty of luddism”, the New Forest National Park in southern England is inviting visitors to lock away phones in what it calls the “world’s first creche for technology and car keys”. The idea is that wandering in the forest without mobiles will “get families connecting.”

Asked about this initiative on BBC radio, Conservative MP Tobias Ellwood made the case for disconnecting. He also commented on plans to introduce wifi to Bournemouth beach. While he welcomed them, he said there should also be mobile-free quiet zones.

Bournemouth also happens to be my local beach. And I profoundly disagree with Mr Ellwood. Mobile-free zones on beaches are technically impractical, if not impossible, and only reinforce the notion that we can’t enjoy nature without being “switched off”. Quiet coaches on trains, arguably an easier thing to enforce, didn’t exactly work and are being scrapped. The idea of depriving people of their connections is a backwards way of thinking and out of step with modern life.

The town, in any case, is supporting Silicon Beach, an annual gathering of techies and digital entrepreneurs, in September. Organiser Matt Desmier recently said that the conference along with other notable digital events, two universities and myriad award-winning agencies, meant Bournemouth was “emerging as a creative and digital hotspot to rival Brighton or Bristol”.

Bournemouth is clearly working towards being a place where wired people can hang out and work while pursuing healthy digital lives. Talking about mobile-free quiet zones at the mere suggestion of having wifi on the beach seems an anathema to this. I know where I’d rather be working (ideally in the sunshine, though Bournemouth of course isn’t the Bahamas).

Spurred on by the moral panic about the time we spend using personal technology, Ellwood said it was “a little bit worrying” that we now carried out offices and social lives with us. Meanwhile, the New Forest National Park declared that “a battle is raging” in families with smartphones.

Is it really? Do any of these claims mean anything at all? Or is it just that X out of Y media outlets think that negative stories about our digital lives attract Z number of readers, while only a minority of readers enjoy technology stories with a positive bent?

Conflicted organisations

The New Forest National Park seems to be engaged in its own conflicted struggle with technology. Is it good for you, or is it not? The park already offers a pretty good New Forest App with advice on where to cycle, walk, sleep and eat, as well as updated events and travel, yet now it seems to want us to stop using it and go off to play among the trees, stripped of our phones.

But is it true that technology makes the outdoor experience somehow impure – a belief that is no doubt ingrained in many minds? Or, alternatively, can it actually expand our enjoyment of it? Perhaps, as I’ve suggested before, we already use our phones to enhance our woodland experiences. They give us maps and GPS, apps for identifying plants and creatures, audio to record them, cameras to photograph them, and tools to draw and write about them. Plus, of course, the ability to call or text if needed. The Wild Network, an offshoot of The National Trust which is dedicated to reconnecting children with nature, is exploring the connections between “screen time” and “wild time”.

Humans have always brought technology into nature, from the earliest adzes and axes to presentday equipment of all kinds. And people have always used natural spaces to connect and socialise, whether in green woodland gatherings or sunny beach parties. Smartphones and devices are a tool too, just a new kind, that come with apps specifically designed to be used in those spaces. Turning off will always be your choice, there’s no need to make up yet more rules about quiet zones.

The proliferation of webcams streaming live feeds has brought wild animals directly onto our screens, sometimes from thousands of miles away. Watching on the web in real time, we can peer into nests, hover over watering-holes, and gaze into zoos. But when something bad happens – an intrinsic part of the wild nature we’re watching – is there anything more going on behind our emotional reactions to end the suffering?

In a recent article in the New York Times, Jon Mooallem reported on a painful drama concerning a family of bald eagles nesting in the Twin Cities area of Minnesota. The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources (DNR) has a live webcam feed to enable nature lovers across the world to lurk unseen as the chicks are raised. But this is real life and prettiness cannot be guaranteed. The DNR made this very clear in two disclaimers on its home page. Viewer discretion is advised and content may not be suitable for younger viewers, it said. The warning was made even more explicit:

This is live video of wild birds in the natural process of raising their young. Life and death struggles occur all the time in the natural world. DNR staff will monitor this camera and will evaluate incidents as they occur, but we do not plan to, nor do we condone, any interference with this nest or its occupants.

The DNR soon found itself in a difficult position: increasing anxiety about the failing health of one of the eagle chicks (nicknamed Snap by its adoring viewers) led to an outpouring of concern until eventually the DNR gave in and went to the rescue. “It was badly injured — most likely trampled accidentally by one of its parents,” Mooallem reported. “It had a severely fractured wing and a systemic infection. There was no chance of recovery. Snap had to be euthanised.”

A webcam set up to bring pleasure to its audience and attract donations to support the programme had opened a ghastly window to the real red-in-tooth-and-claw world of nature, where creatures get hurt and die.

As one woman put it, she wasn’t “up for that learning experience”. But if we’re so keen on nature and how it makes us feel, why did all the webcam watchers feel so distressed when it started to go wrong? Beyond one explanation of anthropomorphism, another could be biophobia – a fear of the natural world.

Natural turn offs

In most cases, images of animals have a beneficial effect on us, says Stephen Kellert, a social ecologist at Yale University. He believes images of animals often provoke satisfaction, pleasure, stimulation and emotional interest. For philosopher Paul Shepard, seeing animals in ornamentation, decoration and art, may lead us to experience “the tug of attention to animals as the curved mirror of ourselves”.

But sometimes we respond fearfully not only to certain living things (most notably spiders, snakes and bugs) but also to some natural situations which might contain hidden dangers and be difficult to escape from, says psychologist Roger Ulrich, writing in The Biophilia Hypothesis. It is this that he describes as biophobia.

Just as positive encounters with nature can have calming effects, argues Ulrich, it follows that the opposite should result in negative effects such as anxiety – something that the many nature centres and wildlife reserves that manage live webcam feeds will be aware of.

Webcams allow us to watch real animals with an unprecedented level of intimacy. But the unrealistic empathy they can create has the potential to provoke real distress when it goes wrong. And this is where it seems we’re only human.