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There's a nervous excitement. I can see the frosty air exhaled by my competitors as they execute the "pre-race" shuffle on the starting line.

A quick movement of the hips.

I'm lined up for my local weekly parkrun event and I'm focused. Three, two, one...

Wait a second. I must adjust my device. The same goes for the person alongside me.

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

In the mele, it's difficult to see a arm without a fitness tracker on it. And this isn't only us athletes who wear them.

It's a thriving, multi-billion dollar market. Companies like Garmin lead the market, all offering an broad selection of various versions to suit a range of lifestyles. Depending on how advanced the device you select, price tags can start from an affordable sum to a significant investment.

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

"It provides solace… It acts as a companion supporting me."

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

A small sample of the responses I've had from other smartwatch wearers when I ask what they think of theirs.

The Data Dilemma

My feelings on my own device? Currently, frustrating. It's indicating I'm off pace, leading me to doubt whether the trees I'm running below are blocking my satellite signal.

Countless individuals of us strap these little monitors onto our wrists and use them all day and night, seemingly at ease with the fact they're continuously monitoring us.

Long past are the days when we used them only to give us an rough count of our daily steps. Now, they can track our sleep quality, stress levels, heart rate variability (HRV), our recovery score.

It's tricky to find a bodily function they fail to monitor.

But can they do what they advertise? And are the statistics we analyse a accurate representation of reality? Do they boost our overall health, or do the avalanche of metrics and cheerleading alerts just increase our sense of overwhelm?

A Love-Hate Relationship

"I become a quite obsessed with mine," one user reveals.

While she values how her device monitors her workouts, she finds some of its other capabilities "overwhelming" at times - a feeling that became apparent during a significant period.

Prior to discovering she could change its configuration, her smartwatch repeatedly informed her she was not being active enough. Now, the watch frequently reports her she's had a poor sleep score.

"I have a young baby, it's unnecessary for me to be informed I've not slept," she says. "I'm acutely aware only too well."

Couldn't she just remove it?

"I suppose I could, perhaps, but I have this push-pull dynamic with it," she continues. "I love it for its workout tracking, I sometimes question whether all the other things it can now do is perhaps too much for me."

How Do They Work?

Different brands of smartwatch has its own proprietary way of measuring your bodily functions and processing your data, but the majority use sensors on the back of the watch.

They usually project tiny, coloured LED lights onto your skin which can detect pulsation, identifying your BPM. Sophisticated devices analyse changes in the bioimpedance that flows through the skin to gauge your nervous system activity.

A Fine Balance

A data scientist says that in general for smartwatches, it's a "delicate equilibrium" - while the rapidly advancing tech could potentially aid early diagnosis, "detecting disease before we show symptoms", it could also turn us watch wearers into the "anxious healthy".

He points out that newer wearables can carry out tests like medical-grade monitoring, which regularly monitor how stable the heart is. They can notify 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 cardiac event, but it can give an early warning they might be more vulnerable of a heart problem in the long term.

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

"I have some doubts that having the capacity to monitor so many things is such a beneficial thing," he says.

A clinical psychologist specialising in wearable tech echoes this sentiment. Her work into the impact 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 increased anxiety and were "had a higher tendency to use medical services".

She observed a cycle with her patients - they noticed a concerning reading on their watch. They became worried. Their BPM rose. They got increasingly anxious. They re-examined the data, and their heart rate rose further.

"When people are presented with numbers about ourselves that we don't really understand then, understandably, we are going to become concerned," the psychologist says. "We monitor, we re-check - it becomes a vicious cycle."