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A sense of nervous excitement. Visible is the frosty air coming from my rivals as they do the "starting line" shuffle on the starting line.

A quick flick of the hips.

I'm participating in my local 5km community parkrun and I mean business. The countdown begins...

Wait a second. I have to start my tracker. The same goes for the person alongside me.

The person behind us tuts. I won't start until… yes! Connection established, away I go.

Amidst the crowd, it's difficult to spot a arm without a wearable on it. And this extends beyond us athletes who rely on them.

This is a explosive, multi-billion pound market. Brands like Garmin are prevalent, all offering an wide array of diverse devices to cater to a variety of budgets. Based on how feature-packed the model you go for, prices can start from a hundred pounds to a significant investment.

"It makes me crazy, it's impossible to stop checking."

"It reassures me… It acts as a companion guiding me."

"Stop telling me I've experienced a poor sleep."

A handful of the comments I've received from like-minded tracker enthusiasts when I ask what they feel about theirs.

A Sea of Statistics

My feelings on mine? Right now, annoying. It's telling me I'm off pace, leading me to doubt whether the trees I'm passing under are interfering with my satellite signal.

A vast number of us fasten these compact monitors onto our wrists and use them constantly, seemingly at ease with the fact they're constantly monitoring us.

Long past are the days when we relied on them exclusively to give us an rough count of our pedometer reading. Now, they can track our sleep patterns, blood pressure, oxygen saturation, our body battery.

It's tricky to find a physical metric they fail to monitor.

But are they able to do what they say they do? And are the data points we scrutinise a accurate representation of the truth? Do they improve our overall health, or do the multitude of readings and motivational messages just increase our daily stresses?

A Love-Hate Relationship

"I find myself getting a quite fixated with mine," one user confesses.

While she appreciates how her device tracks her exercise, she finds some of its other capabilities "daunting" at times - a feeling initially realised during a major life event.

Prior to discovering she could put it into a specific mode, her smartwatch repeatedly informed her she was being insufficiently productive enough. Later on, the watch insists her she's had a bad night's sleep.

"I've got a young baby, it's unnecessary for me to be informed I've not slept," she says. "That fact is all too clearly."

Why doesn't she just take it off?

"I suppose I could, I suppose, but I have this love-hate relationship with it," she continues. "I appreciate it for its fitness insights, but I'm unsure whether the additional features it can now do is maybe excessive for me."

How Do They Work?

Every device of smartwatch has its own novel way of tracking your health metrics and interpreting your data, but the majority use optical sensors on the underside of the watch.

They typically project minute LED lights onto your wrist which can observe blood flow, detecting your heartbeat. Sophisticated devices measure changes in the skin conductance that flows through the skin to assess your nervous system activity.

Expert Perspectives

A professor says that overall for smartwatches, it's a "difficult line" - while the continuously improving tech could actually save lives, "spotting abnormalities before we notice anything", it could also turn us device users into the "concerned but fine".

He points out that the most advanced wearables can carry out tests like heart rhythm analysis, which constantly monitor how stable the heart is. They can alert if someone is experiencing atrial fibrillation (AF), where there is irregular signals in the heart causing an irregular heartbeat.

This does not automatically signal someone is on the verge of a heart attack, but it can give an early warning they might be more vulnerable of a stroke in the long term.

But how to make sense of these readings is complex. The expert worries that as additional features are added, people may not be able to fully comprehend their data.

"I remain sceptical that being able to monitor so many metrics is such a positive development," he says.

A professor studying wearable tech concurs. Her work into the impact of wearable tech on a specific group of heart condition patients suggested a noticeable percentage of those who were given devices to monitor their condition experienced greater stress and were "more inclined to use healthcare resources".

She observed a pattern with her patients - they spotted a worrying figure on their watch. They became worried. Their BPM went up. They got more worried. They re-examined the data, and their heart rate went up again.

"Upon viewing stats about ourselves that we don't really understand then, of course, we are going to become concerned," the psychologist says. "We check, we check again - it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy."