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There's a building tension. I can see the chilled vapour exhaled by my competitors as they do the "about to run" jiggle on the start line.

A quick twitch of the hips.

I'm lined up for my local Saturday morning race and I'm focused. It's almost time...

Hold on. I have to adjust my tracker. As does the guy next to me.

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

During the scramble, it's difficult to spot a person without a fitness tracker on it. And this extends beyond us runners who use them.

We're witnessing a booming, massive sector. Names like Garmin dominate, each with an wide array of various versions to cater to a range of needs. Depending on how high tech the device you select, prices can start from a hundred pounds to thousands of pounds.

"It makes me crazy, it's impossible to switch off."

"It comforts me… It's like a friend supporting me."

"Stop telling me I've experienced a bad night's sleep."

A handful of the comments I've received from fellow device users when I question what they their opinion is on theirs.

The Monitoring Conundrum

My current opinion on my own device? At this moment, annoying. It's reporting my speed is wrong, making me wonder whether the overhead branches along my route are disrupting my GPS connection.

A vast number of us fasten these compact monitors onto our wrists and wear them all day and night, seemingly at ease with the fact they're perpetually monitoring us.

A distant memory are the days when we used them solely to give us an rough count of our pedometer reading. Now, they can track our nightly rest, blood pressure, oxygen saturation, our body battery.

It's tricky to find a health indicator they fail to monitor.

But are they able to do what they claim to do? And are the statistics we scrutinise a accurate representation of the truth? Do they improve our overall health, or do the avalanche of metrics and constant notifications just add to our daily stresses?

A Complicated Bond

"I do get a bit preoccupied with mine," an individual reveals.

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

Until she found out she could change its configuration, her smartwatch constantly alerted her she was not being productive enough. In a new phase, the watch frequently reports her she's had a restless night.

"I've got a six-month old, I don't need to be told my sleep was poor," she says. "That fact is all too clearly."

Why doesn't she just remove it?

"It's possible, I suppose, but I'm in this push-pull dynamic with it," she continues. "I value it for its fitness insights, but I'm unsure whether the additional features it can now do is possibly excessive for me."

Inside the Device

Every device of smartwatch has its own unique way of monitoring your bodily functions and interpreting your data, but the vast bulk use detectors on the reverse of the watch.

They typically shine small, green LED lights onto your wrist which can observe blood flow, detecting your BPM. More advanced devices detect changes in the electrical current that runs through the skin to gauge your recovery state.

Expert Perspectives

A data scientist says that overall for smartwatches, it's a "delicate equilibrium" - while the rapidly advancing tech could actually prevent illness, "spotting abnormalities before we show symptoms", it could also turn us watch wearers into the "concerned but fine".

He points out that newer wearables can perform tests like heart rhythm analysis, which regularly monitor how healthy the heart is. They can alert if someone is experiencing a heart arrhythmia, where there is abnormal electrical activity in the heart causing an arrhythmia.

This does not necessarily indicate someone is imminently going to suffer a cardiac event, but it can give an advance notice they might be more susceptible of a stroke in the future.

But how to make sense of these figures is not straightforward. The expert concerns that as additional features are added, people may struggle to fully understand their data.

"I'm not entirely convinced that the ability to monitor so many things is such a good idea," he says.

A professor specialising in wearable tech echoes this sentiment. A study into the influence of wearable tech on a set of cardiovascular patients suggested a minority of those who were given devices to monitor their heart health experienced greater stress and were "far more likely to use healthcare resources".

She observed 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 went up again.

"When people are presented with numbers about ourselves that we can't properly interpret then, of course, we are going to want to know more," the psychologist says. "We check, we obsess - it becomes a vicious cycle."