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There's a nervous excitement. I can see the chilled vapour coming from my fellow runners as they perform the "pre-race" wiggle on the start line.

A quick twitch of the hips.

I'm at my local 5km community parkrun and I'm focused. The countdown begins...

Wait a second. I need to sort my tracker. The same goes for the runner beside me.

The person in the line expresses impatience. I'm not moving until… yes! GPS ready, I'm off.

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

We're witnessing a booming, multi-billion dollar market. Companies like Garmin dominate, featuring an extensive array of various versions to fit a spectrum of lifestyles. Based on how advanced the device you go for, prices can vary between an affordable sum to a small fortune.

"It drives me insane, I'm unable to relax."

"It comforts me… It acts as a companion guiding me."

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

Just some of the responses I've had from fellow tracker enthusiasts when I ask what they their opinion is on theirs.

The Monitoring Conundrum

My thoughts on my own device? Currently, irritating. It's telling me my speed is wrong, making me wonder whether the foliage I'm running below are disrupting my location tracking.

Countless individuals of us attach these little gadgets onto our wrists and use them all day and night, apparently at ease with the fact they're perpetually tracking us.

A distant memory are the days when we relied on them solely to give us an rough count of our daily steps. Now, they can measure our nightly rest, stress levels, oxygen saturation, our recovery score.

It's difficult to find a physical metric they fail to monitor.

But can they do what they advertise? And are the numbers we analyse a accurate representation of the truth? Do they enhance our daily wellness, or do the multitude of measurements and constant notifications just add to our daily stresses?

Addiction or Aid?

"I become a bit obsessed with mine," an individual confesses.

While she loves how her device records her workouts, she finds some of its other functions "daunting" at times - a feeling first discovered during a pregnancy.

Before she realised she could adjust the settings, her smartwatch constantly alerted her she was not being productive enough. Now, the watch insists her she's had a bad night's sleep.

"I've got a infant, I don't need to be notified I'm tired," she says. "That fact is all too clearly."

Why doesn't she just stop wearing it?

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

The Technology Behind the Tracking

Each model of smartwatch has its own unique way of monitoring your health metrics and interpreting your data, but the majority use detectors on the underside of the watch.

They typically shine small, green LED lights onto your skin which can observe pulsation, detecting your BPM. Higher-end devices measure changes in the skin conductance that runs through the skin to get an idea of your stress levels.

Expert Perspectives

One expert says that overall for smartwatches, it's a "difficult line" - while the ever-evolving tech could actually prevent illness, "identifying issues before we notice anything", it could also turn us the tracked into the "worried well".

He points out that the most advanced wearables can carry out tests like electrocardiograms (ECGs), which constantly monitor how normal the heart is. They can notify if someone is experiencing a heart arrhythmia, where there is irregular electrical activity in the heart causing an arrhythmia.

This does not automatically signal someone is on the verge of a cardiac event, but it can give an preliminary indication they might be more vulnerable of a stroke in the years to come.

But how to make sense of these readings is complex. The expert fears that as more functions are added, people may not be able to fully comprehend their data.

"I have some doubts that having the capacity to monitor so much data is such a beneficial thing," he says.

A health researcher focusing on wearable tech agrees. A study into the effect of wearable tech on a cohort of individuals with health issues suggested a significant portion of those who were given devices to monitor their cardiac function experienced increased anxiety and were "had a higher tendency to use healthcare resources".

She noted a cycle with her patients - they spotted a concerning reading on their watch. They grew concerned. Their heart rate rose. They got even more concerned. They checked again, and their reading rose further.

"Upon viewing data about ourselves that we don't really understand then, naturally, we are going to become concerned," the psychologist says. "We monitor, we check again - it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy."