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An atmosphere of feeling of anticipation. Visible is the frosty air emanating from my fellow runners as they do the "pre-race" shuffle on the start line.

A swift movement of the hips.

I'm lined up for my local 5km community parkrun and I'm serious. The countdown begins...

Oh, hang on. I need to start my tracker. So does the person next to me.

The person waiting sighs. I won't start until… yes! GPS ready, away I go.

During the scramble, it's hard to see a arm without a smartwatch on it. And this isn't only us runners who use them.

This is a explosive, massive market. Companies like Garmin lead the market, each with an wide selection of various versions to suit a variety of needs. Depending on how high tech the watch you select, price tags can range from an affordable sum to a small fortune.

"I find it infuriating, I'm unable to stop checking."

"It reassures me… It feels like a companion guiding me."

"Please don't notify me I've experienced a restless night."

A handful of the comments I've had from other device users when I question what they feel about theirs.

A Sea of Statistics

My feelings on mine? At this moment, annoying. It's telling me I'm not hitting my target, causing me to question whether the overhead branches along my route are interfering with my location tracking.

A vast number of us attach these small monitors onto our arms and use them all day and night, ostensibly at ease with the fact they're continuously recording us.

Long past are the days when we depended on them only to give us an idea of our step count. Currently, they can measure our sleep patterns, heart rate, heart rate variability (HRV), our body battery.

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

But do they do what they advertise? And are the numbers we analyse a accurate representation of our actual health? Do they boost our overall health, or do the multitude of measurements and cheerleading alerts just add to our everyday anxiety?

Addiction or Aid?

"I find myself getting a quite fixated with mine," an individual reveals.

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

Until she found out she could adjust the settings, her smartwatch kept telling her she was failing to be active enough. Now, the watch insists her she's had a restless night.

"I am caring for a six-month old, it's unnecessary for me to be informed I'm tired," she says. "That fact is all too clearly."

Couldn't she just take it off?

"It's possible, perhaps, but I'm in this love-hate relationship with it," she says. "I love it for its exercise data, but I'm unsure whether the additional features it can now do is maybe overkill for me."

The Technology Behind the Tracking

Each model of smartwatch has its own novel way of monitoring your health metrics and processing your data, but the majority use sensors on the back of the watch.

They usually project minute LED lights onto your arm which can observe capillary action, identifying your BPM. Higher-end devices analyse changes in the bioimpedance that runs through the skin to gauge your recovery state.

A Fine Balance

One expert says that overall for smartwatches, it's a "delicate equilibrium" - while the continuously improving tech could actually aid early diagnosis, "identifying issues before we notice anything", it could also turn us device users into the "worried well".

He points out that newer wearables can conduct tests like heart rhythm analysis, which constantly monitor how stable the heart is. They can flag if someone is experiencing atrial fibrillation (AF), where there is abnormal signals in the heart causing an arrhythmia.

This does not automatically signal someone is about to have a cardiac event, but it can give an preliminary indication they might be more at risk of a blood clot in the long term.

But how to make sense of these numbers is not straightforward. The expert worries that as additional features are introduced, people may find it hard to fully contextualise their data.

"I'm not entirely convinced that having the capacity to monitor so much data is such a good idea," he says.

A professor studying cardiology echoes this sentiment. Research into the impact of wearable tech on a specific group of heart condition patients suggested a minority of those who were given devices to monitor their heart health experienced greater stress and were "more inclined to use healthcare resources".

She identified a pattern with her patients - they spotted a alarming metric on their watch. They grew concerned. Their BPM increased. They got more worried. They checked again, and their reading rose further.

"When people are presented with stats about ourselves that we lack context for then, naturally, we are going to want to know more," the psychologist says. "We check, we check again - it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy."