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A sense of feeling of anticipation. Visible is the frosty air emanating from my fellow runners as they do the "starting line" wiggle on the starting line.

A swift twitch of the hips.

I'm at my local 5km community parkrun and I'm serious. It's almost time...

Wait a second. I must sort my tracker. As does the person alongside me.

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

Amidst the crowd, it's hard to see a arm without a fitness tracker on it. And this isn't only us athletes who use them.

We're witnessing a booming, multi-billion dollar market. Brands like Garmin lead the market, featuring an extensive array of diverse models to cater to a spectrum of budgets. According to how advanced the watch you go for, price tags can range from £100 to a small fortune.

"It drives me insane, I can't stop checking."

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

"I wish it wouldn't say about a poor sleep."

A small sample of the reactions I've had from other tracker enthusiasts when I inquire what they think of theirs.

The Monitoring Conundrum

My current opinion on mine? Right now, frustrating. It's telling me I'm not hitting my target, leading me to doubt whether the trees I'm passing under are interfering with my location tracking.

Countless individuals of us fasten these compact monitors onto our wrists and wear them constantly, ostensibly comfortable with the fact they're perpetually tracking us.

Gone are the days when we used them solely to give us an rough count of our daily steps. Currently, they can track our nightly rest, blood pressure, heart rate variability (HRV), our recovery score.

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

But do they do what they claim to do? And are the numbers we scrutinise a accurate representation of the truth? Do they boost our daily wellness, or do the multitude of measurements and cheerleading alerts just increase our sense of overwhelm?

A Love-Hate Relationship

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

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

Until she found out she could adjust the settings, her smartwatch kept telling her she was not being productive enough. Later on, the watch frequently reports her she's had a bad night's sleep.

"I've got a six-month old, it's unnecessary for me to be informed my sleep was poor," she says. "I'm acutely aware all too clearly."

Couldn't she just remove it?

"It's possible, perhaps, but I have this push-pull dynamic with it," she continues. "I appreciate it for its exercise data, but I'm unsure whether the additional features it can now do is possibly too much for me."

How Do They Work?

Every device of smartwatch has its own unique way of tracking your vitals and processing your data, but the most use detectors on the underside of the watch.

They commonly emit minute LED lights onto your arm which can observe blood flow, identifying your heartbeat. Higher-end devices detect changes in the electrical current that flows through the skin to gauge your stress levels.

A Fine Balance

A professor says that in general for smartwatches, it's a "difficult line" - while the rapidly advancing tech could actually aid early diagnosis, "spotting abnormalities before we feel unwell", it could also turn us device users into the "worried well".

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

This does not automatically signal someone is imminently going to suffer a cardiac event, but it can give an advance notice they might be more vulnerable of a heart problem in the years to come.

But how to understand these figures is not straightforward. The expert worries that as further capabilities are added, people may struggle to fully understand their data.

"I'm not entirely convinced that being able to monitor so many metrics is such a beneficial thing," he says.

A clinical psychologist focusing on wearable tech concurs. A study into the effect of wearable tech on a cohort of cardiovascular patients suggested a noticeable percentage of those who were given devices to monitor their condition experienced heightened worry and were "had a higher tendency to use medical services".

She identified a pattern with her patients - they spotted a alarming metric on their watch. They felt anxious. Their pulse went up. They got more worried. They checked again, and their heart rate rose further.

"Upon viewing stats about ourselves that we can't properly interpret then, of course, we are going to become concerned," the psychologist says. "We look, we re-check - it becomes a vicious cycle."