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There's a nervous excitement. Apparent is the chilled vapour coming from my fellow runners as they execute the "pre-race" shuffle on the beginning point.

A quick twitch of the hips.

I'm lined up for my local weekly parkrun event and I mean business. Three, two, one...

Oh, hang on. I need to start my device. So does the runner beside me.

The person in the line expresses impatience. I refuse to go until… done! Signal acquired, I'm off.

In the mele, it's hard to find a person without a smartwatch on it. And it's not just us participants who rely on them.

We're witnessing a thriving, massive sector. Brands like Garmin are prevalent, all offering an extensive array of various versions to fit a range of budgets. Depending on how feature-packed the watch you select, price tags can range from £100 to a small fortune.

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

"It comforts me… It feels like a companion supporting me."

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

A small sample of the responses people have shared from like-minded tracker enthusiasts when I inquire what they think of theirs.

The Monitoring Conundrum

My thoughts on my own device? At this moment, frustrating. It's indicating I'm not hitting my target, making me wonder whether the trees along my route are disrupting my GPS connection.

Millions of us fasten these small gadgets onto our arms and keep them on constantly, seemingly at ease with the fact they're perpetually monitoring us.

A distant memory are the days when we used them only to give us an idea of our step count. Now, they can analyse our nightly rest, stress levels, oxygen saturation, our VO2 max.

It's difficult to find a health indicator they don't track.

But are they able to do what they say they do? And are the data points we analyse a true reflection of our actual health? Do they enhance our mental and physical wellbeing, or do the avalanche of measurements and cheerleading alerts just contribute to our daily stresses?

A Love-Hate Relationship

"I become a bit obsessed with mine," a wearer reveals.

While she loves how her device monitors her runs, she finds some of its other functions "daunting" at times - a feeling that became apparent during a significant period.

Before she realised she could adjust the settings, her smartwatch kept telling her she was failing to be energetic enough. In a new phase, the watch keeps telling her she's had a restless night.

"I've got a young baby, I don't need to be notified my sleep was poor," she says. "That fact is all too clearly."

Couldn't she just remove it?

"I suppose I could, I suppose, but I've got this love-hate relationship with it," she continues. "I love it for its exercise data, but I'm unsure whether the additional features it can now do is maybe too much for me."

How Do They Work?

Every device of smartwatch has its own proprietary way of monitoring your vitals and processing your data, but the vast bulk use sensors on the underside of the watch.

They commonly shine tiny, coloured LED lights onto your wrist which can detect capillary action, recording your pulse rate. Higher-end devices measure changes in the bioimpedance that runs through the skin to assess your nervous system activity.

The Professional Viewpoint

One expert says that for most people for smartwatches, it's a "fine balance" - while the rapidly advancing tech could potentially save lives, "spotting abnormalities before we notice anything", it could also turn us watch wearers into the "anxious healthy".

He points out that some of the latest wearables can perform tests like heart rhythm analysis, which constantly monitor how stable the heart is. They can flag if someone is experiencing a heart arrhythmia, where there is abnormal electrical activity in the heart causing an irregular heartbeat.

This does not necessarily indicate someone is on the verge of a cardiac event, but it can give an preliminary indication they might be more susceptible of a stroke in the long term.

But how to make sense of these readings is complex. The expert fears that as more functions are introduced, people may struggle to fully understand their data.

"I'm not entirely convinced that having the capacity to monitor so many things is such a beneficial thing," he says.

A professor focusing on patient behaviour concurs. Her work into the influence of wearable tech on a specific group of individuals with health issues suggested a significant portion of those who were given devices to monitor their heart health experienced greater stress and were "far more likely to use healthcare resources".

She noted a pattern with her patients - they spotted a worrying figure on their watch. They became worried. Their BPM went up. They got increasingly anxious. They looked a second time, and their reading increased again.

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