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A sense of nervous excitement. Visible is the frosty air exhaled by my competitors as they do the "starting line" shuffle on the beginning point.

A rapid flick of the hips.

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

Oh, hang on. I need to sort my tracker. The same goes for the person beside me.

The person in the line sighs. I'm not moving until… yes! GPS ready, I'm off.

Amidst the crowd, it's difficult to see a wrist without a smartwatch on it. And it's not just us participants who use them.

It's a explosive, multi-billion dollar sector. Names like Samsung Galaxy are prevalent, all offering an wide range of diverse versions to suit a spectrum of needs. According to how feature-packed the device you choose, price tags can range from an affordable sum to a significant investment.

"I find it infuriating, it's impossible to switch off."

"It comforts me… It feels like a supporter encouraging me."

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

A small sample of the comments I've had from fellow device users when I inquire what they their opinion is on theirs.

The Monitoring Conundrum

My current opinion on my own device? Right now, frustrating. It's indicating my speed is wrong, causing me to question whether the foliage I'm passing under are disrupting my GPS connection.

Millions of us attach these small gadgets onto our arms and wear them all day and night, seemingly comfortable with the fact they're continuously tracking us.

Long past are the days when we depended on them exclusively to give us an rough count of our daily steps. Now, they can analyse our sleep patterns, stress levels, oxygen saturation, our VO2 max.

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

But can they do what they advertise? And are the statistics we obsess over a accurate representation of the truth? Do they boost our mental and physical wellbeing, or do the multitude of metrics and motivational messages just add to our everyday anxiety?

A Complicated Bond

"I find myself getting a a little preoccupied with mine," a wearer reveals.

While she loves how her device monitors her runs, she finds some of its other capabilities "excessive" at times - a feeling initially realised during a significant period.

Before she realised she could adjust the settings, her smartwatch constantly alerted her she was being insufficiently productive enough. Now, the watch frequently reports her she's had a restless night.

"I have a infant, it's unnecessary for me to be notified my sleep was poor," she says. "I'm acutely aware perfectly well."

Couldn't she just remove it?

"I could, perhaps, but I'm in this push-pull dynamic with it," she continues. "I appreciate it for its exercise data, I sometimes question whether the myriad other functions it can now do is maybe overkill for me."

How Do They Work?

Every device of smartwatch has its own novel way of measuring your vitals and analysing your data, but the majority use optical sensors on the back of the watch.

They usually shine minute LED lights onto your skin which can observe pulsation, detecting your BPM. Higher-end devices analyse changes in the bioimpedance that passes over the skin to assess your recovery state.

The Professional Viewpoint

One expert says that overall for smartwatches, it's a "difficult line" - while the ever-evolving tech could realistically prevent illness, "detecting disease before we show symptoms", it could also turn us device users into the "worried well".

He points out that newer wearables can carry out tests like medical-grade monitoring, which regularly monitor how healthy the heart is. They can alert if someone is experiencing atrial fibrillation (AF), where there is erratic impulses in the heart causing an arrhythmia.

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

But how to understand these figures is complicated. The expert worries that as more functions are incorporated, people may struggle to fully comprehend their data.

"I remain sceptical that having the capacity to monitor so much data is such a good idea," he says.

A health researcher studying wearable tech agrees. A study 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 heart health experienced greater stress and were "far more likely to use doctor's time".

She observed a cycle with her patients - they spotted a alarming metric on their watch. They grew concerned. Their heart rate rose. They got even more concerned. They looked a second time, and their reading increased again.

"Upon viewing data about ourselves that we don't really understand then, understandably, we are going to seek clarification," the psychologist says. "We check, we obsess - it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy."