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A sense of nervous excitement. Visible is the cold breath coming from my rivals as they perform the "pre-race" wiggle on the start line.

A quick movement of the hips.

I'm at my local Saturday morning race and I'm serious. Three, two, one...

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

The person behind us expresses impatience. I'm not moving until… there! Signal acquired, away I go.

In the mele, it's challenging to spot a person without a smartwatch on it. And it's not just us runners who wear them.

This is a thriving, multi-billion pound market. Companies like Samsung Galaxy are prevalent, all offering an broad selection of diverse devices to cater to a range of budgets. According to how feature-packed the model you choose, costs can start from a hundred pounds to a small fortune.

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

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

"I wish it wouldn't say I've experienced a restless night."

A handful of the comments I've had from like-minded tracker enthusiasts when I ask what they feel about theirs.

The Data Dilemma

My current opinion on mine? At this moment, annoying. It's reporting I'm off pace, leading me to doubt whether the overhead branches along my route are interfering with my GPS connection.

A vast number of us strap these compact monitors onto our wrists and wear them 24/7, seemingly unconcerned with the fact they're constantly recording us.

Long past are the days when we used them exclusively to give us an rough count of our pedometer reading. Now, they can track our sleep patterns, blood pressure, glucose levels, our VO2 max.

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

But can they do what they say they do? And are the numbers we obsess over a true reflection of our actual health? Do they improve our daily wellness, or do the multitude of metrics and cheerleading alerts just increase our daily stresses?

A Love-Hate Relationship

"I become a quite preoccupied with mine," an individual reveals.

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

Prior to discovering she could put it into a specific mode, her smartwatch repeatedly informed her she was being insufficiently productive enough. In a new phase, the watch insists her she's had a restless night.

"I have a infant, there's no point to be informed I'm tired," she says. "That fact is only too well."

Is it not possible to just take it off?

"I suppose I could, perhaps, but I have this love-hate relationship with it," she continues. "I love it for its workout tracking, I just wonder whether the myriad other functions it can now do is possibly overkill for me."

How Do They Work?

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

They commonly emit minute LED lights onto your wrist which can detect capillary action, identifying your BPM. Sophisticated devices analyse changes in the skin conductance that runs through the skin to get an idea of your nervous system activity.

A Fine Balance

A data scientist says that for most people for smartwatches, it's a "delicate equilibrium" - while the rapidly advancing tech could actually prevent illness, "spotting abnormalities before we show symptoms", it could also turn us device users into the "concerned but fine".

He points out that newer wearables can carry out tests like heart rhythm analysis, which continuously monitor how normal the heart is. They can notify if someone is experiencing a heart arrhythmia, where there is abnormal signals in the heart causing an uneven pulse.

This does not necessarily indicate someone is on the verge of a heart attack, but it can give an early warning they might be more susceptible of a heart problem in the future.

But how to make sense of these figures is complicated. The expert fears that as further capabilities are incorporated, people may not be able to fully comprehend their data.

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

A health researcher focusing on cardiology agrees. Research into the impact of wearable tech on a cohort of individuals with health issues suggested a significant portion of those who were given devices to monitor their cardiac function experienced heightened worry and were "more inclined to use healthcare resources".

She observed a cycle with her patients - they spotted a worrying figure on their watch. They grew concerned. Their BPM increased. They got more worried. They re-examined the data, and their heart rate rose further.

"Upon viewing data about ourselves that we can't properly interpret then, naturally, we are going to become concerned," the psychologist says. "We monitor, we check again - it becomes a vicious cycle."