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An atmosphere of nervous excitement. I can see the frosty air coming from my fellow runners as they perform the "about to run" wiggle on the starting line.

A rapid flick of the hips.

I'm lined up for my local Saturday morning race and I'm serious. Three, two, one...

Wait a second. I must adjust my tracker. The same goes for the runner alongside me.

The person behind us tuts. I won't start until… yes! Connection established, and I'm running.

Amidst the crowd, it's difficult to find a person without a wearable on it. And this extends beyond us athletes who use them.

It's a thriving, multi-billion dollar sector. Companies like Samsung Galaxy are prevalent, each with an extensive array of various models to suit a variety of lifestyles. Depending on how feature-packed the watch you choose, price tags can start from a hundred pounds to thousands of pounds.

"It drives me insane, I can't switch off."

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

"Please don't notify me I've experienced a poor sleep."

A small sample of the comments I've received from fellow tracker enthusiasts when I question what they their opinion is on theirs.

The Monitoring Conundrum

My feelings on mine? At this moment, frustrating. It's reporting my speed is wrong, leading me to doubt whether the foliage I'm running below are disrupting my satellite signal.

A vast number of us attach these small gadgets onto our arms and wear them all day and night, seemingly comfortable with the fact they're perpetually recording us.

A distant memory are the days when we depended on them solely to give us an estimation of our step count. Now, they can track our sleep patterns, blood pressure, oxygen saturation, our body battery.

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

But do they do what they advertise? And are the numbers we analyse a accurate representation of reality? Do they enhance our overall health, or do the multitude of readings and cheerleading alerts just increase our daily stresses?

A Complicated Bond

"I become a quite preoccupied with mine," an individual confesses.

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

Before she realised she could put it into a specific mode, her smartwatch constantly alerted her she was failing to be energetic enough. In a new phase, the watch keeps telling her she's had a poor sleep score.

"I am caring for a young baby, I don't need to be told my sleep was poor," she says. "I know that only too well."

Couldn't she just stop wearing it?

"I could, perhaps, but I'm in this push-pull dynamic with it," she explains. "I value it for its exercise data, I just wonder whether the myriad other functions it can now do is perhaps too much for me."

Inside the Device

Different brands of smartwatch has its own proprietary way of tracking your vitals and processing your data, but the most use detectors on the back of the watch.

They commonly emit minute LED lights onto your skin which can monitor capillary action, detecting your pulse rate. Sophisticated devices detect changes in the electrical current that flows through the skin to get an idea of your nervous system activity.

Expert Perspectives

A data scientist says that in general for smartwatches, it's a "fine balance" - while the ever-evolving tech could potentially prevent illness, "spotting abnormalities before we show symptoms", it could also turn us watch wearers into the "anxious healthy".

He points out that newer wearables can conduct tests like electrocardiograms (ECGs), which continuously monitor how healthy the heart is. They can flag if someone is experiencing an irregular rhythm, where there is abnormal signals in the heart causing an arrhythmia.

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

But how to make sense of these readings is complex. The expert worries that as more functions are added, people may find it hard to fully comprehend their data.

"I remain sceptical that having the capacity to monitor so much data is such a positive development," he says.

A professor focusing on cardiology agrees. A study into the effect 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 increased anxiety and were "far more likely to use healthcare resources".

She observed a vicious circle with her patients - they noticed a alarming metric on their watch. They became worried. Their BPM rose. They got even more concerned. They checked again, and their heart rate increased again.

"If we see stats about ourselves that we lack context for then, understandably, we are going to want to know more," the psychologist says. "We look, we obsess - it becomes a vicious cycle."