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A sense of nervous excitement. I can see the frosty air coming from my competitors as they perform the "about to run" jiggle on the beginning point.

A quick flick of the hips.

I'm participating in my local weekly parkrun event and I'm focused. It's almost time...

Hold on. I have to start my tracker. So does the guy beside me.

The person behind us expresses impatience. I refuse to go until… yes! GPS ready, away I go.

In the mele, it's challenging to see a arm without a smartwatch on it. And it's not just us runners who use them.

This is a booming, multi-billion dollar industry. Names like Garmin are prevalent, each with an extensive range of diverse versions to fit a range of needs. According to how high tech the model you select, costs can range from an affordable sum to a small fortune.

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

"It comforts me… It's like a companion guiding me."

"Please don't notify me I've experienced a bad night's sleep."

Just some of the comments I've received from like-minded tracker enthusiasts when I ask what they feel about theirs.

The Monitoring Conundrum

My thoughts on mine? At this moment, irritating. It's reporting I'm off pace, causing me to question whether the foliage I'm passing under are blocking my location tracking.

Millions of us attach these compact gadgets onto our wrists and use them 24/7, ostensibly comfortable with the fact they're perpetually monitoring us.

Gone are the days when we relied on them exclusively to give us an estimation of our daily steps. Now, they can analyse our sleep patterns, stress levels, glucose levels, our body battery.

It's tricky to find a health indicator they aren't designed to measure.

But can they do what they say they do? And are the data points we scrutinise a accurate representation of reality? Do they improve our daily wellness, or do the multitude of measurements and cheerleading alerts just add to our daily stresses?

Addiction or Aid?

"I find myself getting a bit fixated with mine," a wearer confesses.

While she loves how her device monitors her runs, she finds some of its other capabilities "overwhelming" at times - a feeling first discovered during a pregnancy.

Prior to discovering she could adjust the settings, her smartwatch constantly alerted her she was not being active enough. In a new phase, the watch keeps telling her she's had a poor sleep score.

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

Is it not possible to just stop wearing it?

"I suppose I could, I suppose, but I'm in this push-pull dynamic with it," she explains. "I value it for its fitness insights, I sometimes question whether the myriad other functions it can now do is maybe overkill for me."

Inside the Device

Different brands of smartwatch has its own novel way of measuring your health metrics and interpreting your data, but the vast bulk use detectors on the back of the watch.

They typically project tiny, coloured LED lights onto your arm which can monitor pulsation, detecting your heartbeat. More advanced devices measure changes in the bioimpedance that passes over the skin to assess your stress levels.

The Professional Viewpoint

A data scientist says that for most people for smartwatches, it's a "difficult line" - while the ever-evolving tech could actually save lives, "detecting disease 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 electrocardiograms (ECGs), which regularly monitor how stable the heart is. They can notify if someone is experiencing an irregular rhythm, where there is irregular electrical activity in the heart causing an uneven pulse.

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

But how to understand these numbers is complex. The expert concerns that as further capabilities are added, people may find it hard to fully contextualise their data.

"I have some doubts that being able to monitor so many metrics is such a good idea," he says.

A health researcher specialising in patient behaviour echoes this sentiment. Her work into the effect of wearable tech on a cohort of heart condition patients suggested a minority of those who were given devices to monitor their condition experienced greater stress and were "had a higher tendency to use doctor's time".

She identified a cycle with her patients - they spotted a worrying figure on their watch. They grew concerned. Their heart rate increased. They got increasingly anxious. They re-examined the data, and their anxiety went up again.

"When people are presented with data about ourselves that we don't really understand then, understandably, we are going to want to know more," the psychologist says. "We look, we obsess - it becomes a feedback loop."