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A sense of nervous excitement. Visible is the chilled vapour coming from my fellow runners as they do the "starting line" shuffle on the starting line.

A swift twitch of the hips.

I'm at my local 5km community parkrun and I'm focused. Three, two, one...

Wait a second. I must sort my tracker. The same goes for the guy beside me.

The person behind us expresses impatience. I refuse to go until… yes! Signal acquired, I'm off.

Amidst the crowd, it's challenging to find a wrist without a smartwatch on it. And this extends beyond us athletes who use them.

We're witnessing a booming, massive sector. Brands like Samsung Galaxy are prevalent, all offering an wide range of different models to fit a variety of needs. Depending on how advanced the watch you select, costs can range from a hundred pounds to a small fortune.

"I find it infuriating, I can't stop checking."

"It comforts me… It's like a supporter supporting me."

"I wish it wouldn't say about a bad night's sleep."

Just some of the reactions I've had from fellow tracker enthusiasts when I inquire what they feel about theirs.

The Monitoring Conundrum

My thoughts on mine? At this moment, irritating. It's indicating I'm off pace, making me wonder whether the overhead branches I'm passing under are blocking my location tracking.

A vast number of us attach these compact gadgets onto our wrists and use them all day and night, seemingly comfortable with the fact they're continuously monitoring us.

A distant memory are the days when we relied on them exclusively to give us an rough count of our step count. Currently, they can analyse our sleep patterns, blood pressure, glucose levels, our VO2 max.

It's tricky to find a physical metric they don't track.

But are they able to do what they advertise? And are the data points we obsess over a faithful picture of our actual health? Do they enhance our daily wellness, or do the plethora of readings and cheerleading alerts just contribute to our daily stresses?

A Love-Hate Relationship

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

While she appreciates how her device records her runs, she finds some of its other features "excessive" at times - a feeling first discovered during a pregnancy.

Before she realised she could put it into a specific mode, her smartwatch kept telling her she was not being energetic enough. In a new phase, the watch keeps telling her she's had a poor sleep score.

"I've got a six-month old, I don't need to be notified my sleep was poor," she says. "I know that only too well."

Is it not possible to just take it off?

"It's possible, I suppose, but I've got this push-pull dynamic with it," she says. "I love it for its exercise data, I sometimes question whether the myriad other functions 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 optical sensors on the reverse of the watch.

They usually shine minute LED lights onto your skin which can monitor pulsation, identifying your BPM. Sophisticated devices analyse changes in the skin conductance that runs through the skin to assess your recovery state.

A Fine Balance

A professor says that overall for smartwatches, it's a "delicate equilibrium" - while the rapidly advancing tech could realistically prevent illness, "identifying issues before we show symptoms", it could also turn us the tracked into the "concerned but fine".

He points out that the most advanced wearables can conduct tests like heart rhythm analysis, which regularly monitor how healthy the heart is. They can notify if someone is experiencing atrial fibrillation (AF), where there is erratic impulses in the heart causing an arrhythmia.

This does not necessarily indicate someone is about to have a cardiac event, but it can give an preliminary indication they might be more vulnerable of a heart problem in the future.

But how to understand these numbers is complicated. The expert concerns that as more functions are added, people may not be able to fully understand their data.

"I'm not entirely convinced that having the capacity to monitor so many things is such a beneficial thing," he says.

A professor specialising in patient behaviour agrees. A study into the impact of wearable tech on a cohort of individuals with health issues suggested a noticeable percentage of those who were given devices to monitor their cardiac function experienced heightened worry and were "had a higher tendency to use healthcare resources".

She observed a cycle with her patients - they saw a concerning reading on their watch. They grew concerned. Their heart rate increased. They got increasingly anxious. They checked again, and their reading went up again.

"Upon viewing numbers about ourselves that we don't really understand then, of course, we are going to want to know more," the psychologist says. "We check, we check again - it becomes a feedback loop."