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An atmosphere of nervous excitement. I can see the cold breath coming from my competitors as they perform the "starting line" shuffle on the starting line.

A quick twitch of the hips.

I'm lined up for my local 5km community parkrun and I mean business. Three, two, one...

Hold on. I must start my device. The same goes for the person next to me.

The person in the line expresses impatience. I won't start until… there! Signal acquired, and I'm running.

In the mele, it's hard to spot a person without a fitness tracker on it. And this isn't only us runners who use them.

This is a booming, multi-billion dollar industry. Names like Apple Watch dominate, all offering an wide array of various devices to cater to a spectrum of lifestyles. Depending on how advanced the device you choose, costs can range from an affordable sum to a significant investment.

"It drives me insane, it's impossible to stop checking."

"It reassures me… It's like a companion encouraging me."

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

Just some of the reactions people have shared from like-minded smartwatch wearers when I question what they think of theirs.

A Sea of Statistics

My current opinion on my own device? Currently, annoying. It's indicating I'm off pace, causing me to question whether the foliage I'm running below are interfering with my GPS connection.

A vast number of us strap these little gadgets onto our arms and wear them all day and night, seemingly comfortable with the fact they're continuously recording us.

A distant memory are the days when we used them only to give us an estimation of our step count. Now, they can measure our sleep quality, heart rate, glucose levels, our body battery.

It's difficult to find a physical metric they aren't designed to measure.

But are they able to do what they claim to do? And are the data points we scrutinise a faithful picture of reality? Do they boost our daily wellness, or do the multitude of metrics and motivational messages just add to our everyday anxiety?

Addiction or Aid?

"I become a bit obsessed with mine," an individual confesses.

While she appreciates how her device tracks her runs, she finds some of its other capabilities "overwhelming" at times - a feeling first discovered during a major life event.

Before she realised she could put it into a specific mode, her smartwatch kept telling her she was failing to be energetic enough. In a new phase, the watch insists her she's had a poor sleep score.

"I've got a young baby, it's unnecessary for me to be told I'm tired," she says. "I know that all too clearly."

Couldn't she just stop wearing it?

"I suppose I could, theoretically, but I'm in this love-hate relationship with it," she says. "I love it for its fitness insights, I just wonder whether the additional features it can now do is maybe excessive for me."

The Technology Behind the Tracking

Different brands of smartwatch has its own novel way of tracking your bodily functions and analysing your data, but the vast bulk use sensors on the reverse of the watch.

They usually emit tiny, coloured LED lights onto your wrist which can monitor blood flow, identifying your pulse rate. Sophisticated devices detect changes in the skin conductance that passes over the skin to assess your nervous system activity.

The Professional Viewpoint

A professor says that for most people for smartwatches, it's a "difficult line" - while the ever-evolving tech could realistically aid early diagnosis, "spotting abnormalities before we show symptoms", it could also turn us the tracked into the "worried well".

He points out that the most advanced wearables can conduct tests like heart rhythm analysis, which continuously monitor how normal the heart is. They can alert if someone is experiencing atrial fibrillation (AF), where there is abnormal signals in the heart causing an uneven pulse.

This does not mean someone is imminently going to suffer a heart attack, but it can give an advance notice they might be more vulnerable of a stroke in the long term.

But how to make sense of these numbers is not straightforward. The expert worries that as more functions are introduced, people may not be able to fully contextualise their data.

"I'm not entirely convinced that being able to monitor so many metrics is such a positive development," he says.

A health researcher specialising in cardiology echoes this sentiment. Her work into the effect of wearable tech on a set of heart condition patients suggested a minority of those who were given devices to monitor their heart health experienced increased anxiety and were "had a higher tendency to use medical services".

She noted a vicious circle with her patients - they noticed a concerning reading on their watch. They became worried. Their BPM increased. They got increasingly anxious. They looked a second time, and their reading increased again.

"Upon viewing data about ourselves that we can't properly interpret then, naturally, we are going to seek clarification," the psychologist says. "We look, we re-check - it becomes a feedback loop."