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An atmosphere of feeling of anticipation. Apparent is the chilled vapour emanating from my competitors as they execute the "starting line" shuffle on the starting line.

A rapid flick of the hips.

I'm at my local 5km community parkrun and I'm serious. It's almost time...

Hold on. I must adjust my device. As does the guy beside me.

The person in the line sighs. I refuse to go until… done! Connection established, I'm off.

During the scramble, it's challenging to spot a arm without a smartwatch on it. And this isn't only us runners who rely on them.

It's a explosive, massive market. Brands like Garmin are prevalent, all offering an extensive array of diverse devices to fit a range of lifestyles. According to how advanced the watch you select, price tags can start from £100 to a significant investment.

"It makes me crazy, I can't switch off."

"It reassures me… It acts as a friend supporting me."

"I wish it wouldn't say about a bad night's sleep."

Just some of the responses I've received from like-minded device users when I question what they feel about theirs.

A Sea of Statistics

My current opinion on my own device? Currently, irritating. It's indicating I'm off pace, causing me to question whether the foliage I'm passing under are blocking my location tracking.

Countless individuals of us fasten these small monitors onto our wrists and wear them constantly, ostensibly comfortable with the fact they're constantly monitoring us.

Gone are the days when we depended on them exclusively to give us an rough count of our step count. Currently, they can track our nightly rest, heart rate, glucose levels, our body battery.

It's tricky to find a physical metric they aren't designed to measure.

But are they able to do what they advertise? And are the data points we scrutinise a true reflection of the truth? Do they improve our overall health, or do the avalanche of readings and motivational messages just increase our everyday anxiety?

A Love-Hate Relationship

"I become a a little fixated with mine," an individual reveals.

While she appreciates how her device tracks her exercise, she finds some of its other features "daunting" at times - a feeling that became apparent during a significant period.

Before she realised she could put it into a specific mode, her smartwatch constantly alerted her she was being insufficiently energetic enough. Later on, the watch keeps telling her she's had a restless night.

"I have a infant, it's unnecessary for me to be notified I've not slept," she says. "I know that only too well."

Couldn't she just stop wearing it?

"I could, perhaps, but I'm in this love-hate relationship with it," she explains. "I appreciate it for its fitness insights, I just wonder whether the additional features it can now do is perhaps excessive for me."

Inside the Device

Every device of smartwatch has its own novel way of measuring your vitals and interpreting your data, but the vast bulk use sensors on the reverse of the watch.

They commonly project tiny, coloured LED lights onto your arm which can detect capillary action, detecting your pulse rate. More advanced devices detect changes in the electrical current that passes over the skin to get an idea of your stress levels.

A Fine Balance

A data scientist says that overall for smartwatches, it's a "fine balance" - while the continuously improving tech could actually save lives, "spotting abnormalities before we feel unwell", it could also turn us the tracked into the "concerned but fine".

He points out that some of the latest wearables can perform tests like medical-grade monitoring, which constantly monitor how healthy the heart is. They can alert if someone is experiencing an irregular rhythm, where there is erratic impulses in the heart causing an irregular heartbeat.

This does not automatically signal someone is about to have a cardiac event, 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 complicated. The expert worries that as more functions are incorporated, people may find it hard to fully comprehend their data.

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

A clinical psychologist focusing on cardiology echoes this sentiment. Her work into the impact of wearable tech on a cohort of cardiovascular patients 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 medical services".

She observed a cycle with her patients - they noticed a alarming metric on their watch. They felt anxious. Their pulse went up. They got increasingly anxious. They re-examined the data, and their anxiety went up again.

"Upon viewing numbers about ourselves that we don't really understand then, of course, we are going to become concerned," the psychologist says. "We monitor, we re-check - it becomes a vicious cycle."