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There's a nervous excitement. Apparent is the frosty air exhaled by my fellow runners as they perform the "starting line" shuffle on the starting line.

A quick flick of the hips.

I'm participating in my local weekly parkrun event and I'm serious. The countdown begins...

Oh, hang on. I must start my tracker. The same goes for the guy beside me.

The person in the line tuts. I refuse to go until… done! GPS ready, I'm off.

During the scramble, it's challenging to find a arm without a smartwatch on it. And this extends beyond us participants who use them.

It's a explosive, multi-billion pound industry. Names like Garmin lead the market, featuring an broad array of different devices to fit a variety of needs. Depending on how feature-packed the watch you choose, costs can start from £100 to a significant investment.

"It makes me crazy, it's impossible to switch off."

"It provides solace… It feels like a supporter encouraging me."

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

Just some of the comments I've had from like-minded tracker enthusiasts when I inquire what they their opinion is on theirs.

The Data Dilemma

My thoughts on mine? Right now, annoying. It's telling me I'm not hitting my target, leading me to doubt whether the foliage along my route are interfering with my location tracking.

A vast number of us fasten these little monitors onto our wrists and use them all day and night, ostensibly at ease with the fact they're constantly recording us.

Long past are the days when we depended on them solely to give us an rough count of our daily steps. Currently, they can measure our sleep quality, stress levels, glucose levels, our body battery.

It's tricky to find a health indicator they aren't designed to measure.

But do they do what they claim to do? And are the numbers we scrutinise a true reflection of the truth? Do they boost our daily wellness, or do the multitude of metrics and constant notifications just contribute to our everyday anxiety?

A Love-Hate Relationship

"I find myself getting a a little fixated with mine," an individual admits.

While she appreciates how her device records her exercise, she finds some of its other capabilities "overwhelming" at times - a feeling initially realised during a significant period.

Prior to discovering she could adjust the settings, her smartwatch kept telling her she was being insufficiently energetic enough. Now, the watch keeps telling her she's had a restless night.

"I've got a infant, I don't need to be notified I'm tired," she says. "That fact is all too clearly."

Is it not possible to just stop wearing it?

"I suppose I could, perhaps, but I'm in this push-pull dynamic with it," she continues. "I value it for its workout tracking, I sometimes question whether the additional features it can now do is maybe overkill for me."

Inside the Device

Every device of smartwatch has its own unique way of monitoring your health metrics and analysing your data, but the vast bulk use sensors on the back of the watch.

They commonly emit tiny, coloured LED lights onto your skin which can monitor capillary action, identifying your BPM. Sophisticated devices detect changes in the electrical current that flows through the skin to assess your recovery state.

The Professional Viewpoint

A professor says that in general for smartwatches, it's a "difficult line" - while the rapidly advancing tech could actually save lives, "spotting abnormalities before we feel unwell", it could also turn us the tracked into the "concerned but fine".

He points out that some of the latest wearables can conduct tests like medical-grade monitoring, which continuously monitor how normal the heart is. They can notify if someone is experiencing atrial fibrillation (AF), where there is irregular signals in the heart causing an irregular heartbeat.

This does not necessarily indicate someone is imminently going to suffer a cardiac event, but it can give an early warning they might be more vulnerable of a blood clot in the future.

But how to interpret these readings is not straightforward. The expert concerns that as additional features are introduced, people may struggle to fully contextualise their data.

"I'm not entirely convinced that the ability to monitor so much data is such a beneficial thing," he says.

A clinical psychologist focusing on cardiology echoes this sentiment. Her work into the effect of wearable tech on a cohort of individuals with health issues suggested a minority of those who were given devices to monitor their heart health experienced heightened worry and were "more inclined to use healthcare resources".

She observed a vicious circle with her patients - they saw a worrying figure on their watch. They grew concerned. Their BPM increased. They got more worried. They re-examined the data, and their heart rate rose further.

"If we see numbers about ourselves that we lack context for then, understandably, we are going to seek clarification," the psychologist says. "We monitor, we obsess - it becomes a feedback loop."