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There's a building tension. Apparent is the frosty air exhaled by my rivals as they do the "pre-race" shuffle on the start line.

A rapid flick of the hips.

I'm lined up for my local 5km community parkrun and I mean business. The countdown begins...

Oh, hang on. I have to adjust my watch. The same goes for the person alongside me.

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

Amidst the crowd, it's challenging to spot a arm without a fitness tracker on it. And it's not just us runners who wear them.

It's a thriving, multi-billion dollar market. Companies like Samsung Galaxy lead the market, all offering an wide selection of different devices to suit a variety of budgets. Based on how high tech the device you choose, price tags can range from a hundred pounds to a significant investment.

"I find it infuriating, I can't switch off."

"It reassures me… It acts as a friend guiding me."

"Please don't notify me about a restless night."

A handful of the responses I've received from fellow smartwatch wearers when I ask what they feel about theirs.

The Monitoring Conundrum

My current opinion on my own device? At this moment, irritating. It's reporting I'm off pace, causing me to question whether the trees along my route are blocking my location tracking.

Countless individuals of us fasten these small devices onto our arms and keep them on constantly, apparently comfortable with the fact they're continuously tracking us.

Gone are the days when we used them only to give us an rough count of our step count. Now, they can analyse our sleep patterns, stress levels, heart rate variability (HRV), our VO2 max.

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

But do they do what they claim to do? And are the statistics we analyse a faithful picture of reality? Do they boost our mental and physical wellbeing, or do the avalanche of measurements and cheerleading alerts just contribute to our everyday anxiety?

A Love-Hate Relationship

"I do get a a little fixated with mine," one user reveals.

While she appreciates how her device tracks her exercise, she finds some of its other functions "overwhelming" at times - a feeling that became apparent during a major life event.

Prior to discovering she could put it into a specific mode, her smartwatch kept telling her she was being insufficiently productive enough. Now, the watch keeps telling her she's had a bad night's sleep.

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

Couldn't she just stop wearing it?

"I suppose I could, I suppose, but I have this love-hate relationship with it," she says. "I love it for its exercise data, but I'm unsure whether all the other things it can now do is maybe too much for me."

How Do They Work?

Different brands of smartwatch has its own novel way of tracking your health metrics and processing your data, but the most use sensors on the underside of the watch.

They commonly project minute LED lights onto your arm which can monitor capillary action, detecting your pulse rate. Sophisticated devices measure changes in the bioimpedance that flows through the skin to gauge your recovery state.

A Fine Balance

A professor says that for most people for smartwatches, it's a "difficult line" - while the ever-evolving tech could realistically aid early diagnosis, "detecting disease before we feel unwell", it could also turn us watch wearers into the "concerned but fine".

He points out that newer wearables can perform 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 erratic electrical activity in the heart causing an irregular heartbeat.

This does not mean someone is about to have a cardiac event, but it can give an advance notice they might be more vulnerable of a blood clot in the years to come.

But how to interpret these readings is complex. The expert concerns that as further capabilities are incorporated, people may not be able to fully understand their data.

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

A professor studying wearable tech agrees. Her work into the impact of wearable tech on a cohort of heart condition patients suggested a noticeable percentage of those who were given devices to monitor their condition experienced heightened worry and were "far more likely to use healthcare resources".

She identified a cycle with her patients - they saw a worrying figure on their watch. They grew concerned. Their BPM went up. They got even more concerned. They checked again, and their heart rate went up again.

"Upon viewing stats about ourselves that we lack context for then, of course, we are going to seek clarification," the psychologist says. "We check, we obsess - it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy."