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A sense of feeling of anticipation. Visible is the frosty air emanating from my fellow runners as they perform the "pre-race" jiggle on the beginning point.

A rapid movement of the hips.

I'm at my local 5km community parkrun and I'm serious. Three, two, one...

Wait a second. I need to adjust my device. The same goes for the runner next to me.

The person in the line expresses impatience. I refuse to go until… there! Signal acquired, away I go.

In the mele, it's hard to spot a person without a fitness tracker on it. And this extends beyond us runners who rely on them.

It's a thriving, massive market. Names like Garmin are prevalent, all offering an broad selection of different models to cater to a variety of needs. Depending on how advanced the watch you select, price tags can vary between £100 to a small fortune.

"It drives me insane, it's impossible to switch off."

"It provides solace… It feels like a companion encouraging me."

"Please don't notify me about a bad night's sleep."

A small sample of the comments I've received from like-minded device users when I ask what they feel about theirs.

The Monitoring Conundrum

My current opinion on mine? Right now, frustrating. It's telling me my speed is wrong, causing me to question whether the overhead branches I'm passing under are disrupting my location tracking.

Millions of us strap these little monitors onto our wrists and keep them on constantly, apparently unconcerned with the fact they're constantly monitoring us.

A distant memory are the days when we relied on them only to give us an rough count of our step count. Now, they can track our sleep quality, blood pressure, oxygen saturation, our recovery score.

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

But do they do what they advertise? And are the statistics we obsess over a faithful picture of our actual health? Do they improve our mental and physical wellbeing, or do the multitude of readings and constant notifications just add to our daily stresses?

A Complicated Bond

"I find myself getting a quite fixated with mine," a wearer admits.

While she values how her device tracks her runs, she finds some of its other features "daunting" at times - a feeling first discovered during a significant period.

Until she found out she could adjust the settings, 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 infant, there's no point to be informed I've not slept," she says. "I'm acutely aware only too well."

Is it not possible to just remove it?

"I suppose I could, perhaps, but I've got this complicated dynamic with it," she says. "I appreciate it for its workout tracking, I just wonder whether the additional features it can now do is maybe too much for me."

How Do They Work?

Each model of smartwatch has its own unique way of monitoring your vitals and processing your data, but the majority use optical sensors on the reverse of the watch.

They usually emit minute LED lights onto your skin which can observe pulsation, recording your BPM. More advanced 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 in general for smartwatches, it's a "fine balance" - while the ever-evolving tech could realistically aid early diagnosis, "detecting disease before we feel unwell", it could also turn us the tracked into the "worried well".

He points out that newer wearables can carry out tests like electrocardiograms (ECGs), which constantly monitor how healthy the heart is. They can notify if someone is experiencing a heart arrhythmia, where there is irregular signals in the heart causing an uneven pulse.

This does not automatically signal someone is on the verge of a heart attack, but it can give an early warning they might be more vulnerable of a blood clot in the future.

But how to make sense of these readings is not straightforward. The expert worries that as further capabilities are incorporated, people may not be able to fully contextualise their data.

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

A professor studying patient behaviour echoes this sentiment. A study into the impact of wearable tech on a set of cardiovascular patients suggested a significant portion of those who were given devices to monitor their heart health experienced greater stress and were "had a higher tendency to use medical services".

She noted a vicious circle with her patients - they saw a worrying figure on their watch. They became worried. Their heart rate increased. They got even more concerned. They looked a second time, and their anxiety increased again.

"When people are presented with stats about ourselves that we can't properly interpret then, understandably, we are going to become concerned," the psychologist says. "We monitor, we check again - it becomes a vicious cycle."