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A sense of feeling of anticipation. I can see the chilled vapour exhaled by my fellow runners as they execute the "starting line" jiggle on the start line.

A rapid twitch of the hips.

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

Hold on. I must start my tracker. So does the guy alongside me.

The person in the line sighs. I refuse to go until… done! Signal acquired, I'm off.

During the scramble, it's hard to find a person without a fitness tracker on it. And this extends beyond us participants who use them.

We're witnessing a thriving, multi-billion pound industry. Names like Garmin dominate, all offering an extensive array of different devices to suit a variety of budgets. Based on how feature-packed the device you choose, price tags can vary between an affordable sum to thousands of pounds.

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

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

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

A handful of the reactions I've had from other smartwatch wearers when I inquire what they their opinion is on theirs.

The Monitoring Conundrum

My feelings on mine? At this moment, irritating. It's reporting my speed is wrong, causing me to question whether the overhead branches I'm passing under are disrupting my location tracking.

Countless individuals of us strap these little devices onto our arms and use them all day and night, seemingly comfortable with the fact they're perpetually monitoring us.

A distant memory are the days when we used them solely to give us an idea of our step count. Now, they can track our nightly rest, stress levels, oxygen saturation, our recovery score.

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

But are they able to do what they claim to do? And are the statistics we obsess over a true reflection of our actual health? Do they enhance our daily wellness, or do the multitude of metrics and cheerleading alerts just increase our everyday anxiety?

Addiction or Aid?

"I become a a little fixated with mine," an individual admits.

While she loves how her device monitors her runs, she finds some of its other capabilities "daunting" 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 being insufficiently active enough. Now, the watch insists her she's had a bad night's sleep.

"I am caring for a infant, it's unnecessary for me to be notified I'm tired," she says. "I know that perfectly well."

Is it not possible to just stop wearing it?

"I could, theoretically, but I have this complicated dynamic with it," she continues. "I value it for its exercise data, I just wonder whether the additional features it can now do is maybe overkill for me."

Inside the Device

Each model of smartwatch has its own unique way of tracking your bodily functions and interpreting your data, but the majority use optical sensors on the underside of the watch.

They usually emit small, green LED lights onto your skin which can observe blood flow, identifying your heartbeat. Sophisticated devices analyse changes in the bioimpedance that passes over the skin to assess your stress levels.

A Fine Balance

A data scientist says that overall for smartwatches, it's a "delicate equilibrium" - while the rapidly advancing tech could potentially aid early diagnosis, "spotting abnormalities before we notice anything", it could also turn us watch wearers into the "worried well".

He points out that some of the latest wearables can carry out tests like medical-grade monitoring, which regularly monitor how healthy the heart is. They can flag if someone is experiencing atrial fibrillation (AF), where there is abnormal electrical activity in the heart causing an arrhythmia.

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

But how to interpret these readings is complicated. The expert worries that as additional features 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 beneficial thing," he says.

A clinical psychologist specialising in wearable tech concurs. Her work into the impact of wearable tech on a specific group of individuals with health issues suggested a significant portion of those who were given devices to monitor their heart health experienced increased anxiety and were "far more likely to use healthcare resources".

She observed a vicious circle with her patients - they noticed a concerning reading on their watch. They felt anxious. Their pulse rose. They got even more concerned. They re-examined the data, and their anxiety rose further.

"If we see data about ourselves that we can't properly interpret then, understandably, we are going to want to know more," the psychologist says. "We check, we check again - it becomes a feedback loop."