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A sense of feeling of anticipation. Visible is the cold breath coming from my fellow runners as they perform the "pre-race" wiggle on the beginning point.

A quick flick of the hips.

I'm participating in my local Saturday morning race and I mean business. Three, two, one...

Wait a second. I must start my device. The same goes for the guy alongside me.

The person waiting sighs. I refuse to go until… there! GPS ready, I'm off.

In the mele, it's challenging to find a arm without a fitness tracker on it. And this isn't only us participants who rely on them.

It's a explosive, multi-billion pound market. Names like Garmin lead the market, each with an broad range of different versions to suit a range of needs. Based on how advanced the model you select, prices can range from an affordable sum to thousands of pounds.

"I find it infuriating, I can't switch off."

"It provides solace… It acts as a friend guiding me."

"Stop telling me about a bad night's sleep."

Just some of the reactions I've had from other smartwatch wearers when I inquire what they think of theirs.

The Monitoring Conundrum

My feelings on mine? Currently, frustrating. It's telling me my speed is wrong, causing me to question whether the foliage along my route are disrupting my satellite signal.

A vast number of us attach these little gadgets onto our arms and keep them on all day and night, ostensibly unconcerned with the fact they're perpetually tracking us.

Gone are the days when we depended on them exclusively to give us an estimation of our daily steps. Currently, they can analyse our sleep quality, blood pressure, oxygen saturation, our VO2 max.

It's a challenge to find a bodily function they don't track.

But do they do what they claim to do? And are the numbers we analyse a accurate representation of the truth? Do they boost our daily wellness, or do the avalanche of measurements and cheerleading alerts just increase our everyday anxiety?

A Love-Hate Relationship

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

While she values how her device tracks her runs, she finds some of its other capabilities "overwhelming" 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 kept telling her she was failing to be energetic enough. In a new phase, the watch keeps telling her she's had a bad night's sleep.

"I have a infant, it's unnecessary for me to be notified my sleep was poor," she says. "I'm acutely aware perfectly well."

Why doesn't she just stop wearing it?

"I could, perhaps, but I'm in this complicated dynamic with it," she explains. "I love it for its workout tracking, but I'm unsure whether the myriad other functions it can now do is perhaps excessive for me."

Inside the Device

Different brands of smartwatch has its own proprietary way of tracking your health metrics and analysing your data, but the most use detectors on the reverse of the watch.

They usually emit tiny, coloured LED lights onto your wrist which can detect blood flow, recording your BPM. Sophisticated devices measure changes in the skin conductance that runs through the skin to assess your recovery state.

The Professional Viewpoint

A professor says that overall for smartwatches, it's a "fine balance" - while the rapidly advancing tech could realistically aid early diagnosis, "identifying issues before we notice anything", it could also turn us the tracked into the "concerned but fine".

He points out that some of the latest wearables can conduct tests like medical-grade monitoring, which continuously monitor how healthy the heart is. They can flag if someone is experiencing an irregular rhythm, where there is erratic electrical activity in the heart causing an uneven pulse.

This does not mean someone is imminently going to suffer a heart attack, but it can give an early warning they might be more at risk of a blood clot in the years to come.

But how to make sense of these figures is complicated. The expert concerns that as more functions are incorporated, people may not be able to fully contextualise their data.

"I remain sceptical that being able to monitor so many things is such a positive development," he says.

A professor focusing on patient behaviour agrees. Research into the effect of wearable tech on a set of individuals with health issues suggested a noticeable percentage of those who were given devices to monitor their cardiac function experienced heightened worry and were "had a higher tendency to use doctor's time".

She noted a vicious circle with her patients - they spotted a concerning reading on their watch. They became worried. Their pulse went up. They got increasingly anxious. They checked again, and their reading increased again.

"Upon viewing numbers about ourselves that we don't really understand then, of course, we are going to want to know more," the psychologist says. "We check, we re-check - it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy."