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

A swift flick of the hips.

I'm at my local 5km community parkrun and I'm focused. Three, two, one...

Oh, hang on. I must start my watch. The same goes for the runner alongside me.

The person waiting tuts. I'm not moving until… yes! GPS ready, and I'm running.

Amidst the crowd, it's challenging to see a arm without a smartwatch on it. And this extends beyond us athletes who use them.

We're witnessing a thriving, multi-billion pound sector. Brands like Garmin dominate, featuring an extensive array of various devices to cater to a spectrum of budgets. According to how feature-packed the model you select, price tags can vary between an affordable sum to a small fortune.

"I find it infuriating, I can't stop checking."

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

"Stop telling me I've had a restless night."

Just some of the reactions I've received from like-minded tracker enthusiasts when I inquire what they their opinion is on theirs.

A Sea of Statistics

My feelings on mine? Currently, irritating. It's telling me my speed is wrong, making me wonder whether the trees I'm running below are disrupting my satellite signal.

Countless individuals of us attach these compact devices onto our wrists and wear them constantly, ostensibly unconcerned with the fact they're perpetually tracking us.

A distant memory are the days when we relied on them only to give us an rough count of our pedometer reading. Currently, they can track our sleep quality, blood pressure, oxygen saturation, our recovery score.

It's tricky to find a physical metric they don't track.

But are they able to do what they claim to do? And are the data points we obsess over a faithful picture of reality? Do they improve our daily wellness, or do the avalanche of readings and cheerleading alerts just add to our sense of overwhelm?

Addiction or Aid?

"I find myself getting a quite obsessed with mine," a wearer reveals.

While she values how her device records her exercise, she finds some of its other features "excessive" at times - a feeling first discovered during a significant period.

Prior to discovering she could adjust the settings, her smartwatch kept telling her she was not being energetic enough. Now, the watch insists her she's had a poor sleep score.

"I've got a six-month old, I don't need to be told I'm tired," she says. "That fact is only too well."

Is it not possible to just stop wearing it?

"I suppose I could, I suppose, but I'm in this push-pull dynamic with it," she says. "I love it for its fitness insights, but I'm unsure whether all the other things it can now do is perhaps too much for me."

Inside the Device

Different brands of smartwatch has its own novel way of tracking your vitals and processing your data, but the majority use detectors on the reverse of the watch.

They typically emit minute LED lights onto your arm which can detect blood flow, identifying your BPM. Higher-end devices measure changes in the skin conductance that flows through the skin to gauge your stress levels.

A Fine Balance

A professor says that overall for smartwatches, it's a "difficult line" - while the rapidly advancing tech could realistically aid early diagnosis, "detecting disease before we show symptoms", it could also turn us watch wearers into the "worried well".

He points out that some of the latest wearables can perform tests like medical-grade monitoring, which continuously monitor how normal the heart is. They can flag if someone is experiencing a heart arrhythmia, where there is irregular electrical activity in the heart causing an irregular heartbeat.

This does not necessarily indicate someone is about to have a heart attack, but it can give an early warning they might be more susceptible of a heart problem in the years to come.

But how to interpret these numbers is complicated. The expert fears that as further capabilities are introduced, people may not be able to fully contextualise their data.

"I'm not entirely convinced that being able to monitor so much data is such a positive development," he says.

A health researcher studying patient behaviour concurs. Research into the influence of wearable tech on a set of individuals with health issues suggested a minority of those who were given devices to monitor their cardiac function experienced greater stress and were "far more likely to use medical services".

She observed a cycle with her patients - they spotted a alarming metric on their watch. They became worried. Their pulse increased. They got increasingly anxious. They looked a second time, and their reading increased again.

"When people are presented with numbers about ourselves that we can't properly interpret then, understandably, we are going to seek clarification," the psychologist says. "We check, we check again - it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy."