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An atmosphere of feeling of anticipation. Visible is the cold breath emanating from my competitors as they perform the "starting line" jiggle on the start line.

A rapid flick of the hips.

I'm at my local Saturday morning race and I'm focused. The countdown begins...

Wait a second. I must adjust my tracker. As does the guy beside me.

The person behind us expresses impatience. I refuse to go until… yes! Signal acquired, I'm off.

In the mele, it's challenging to see a person without a wearable on it. And this isn't only us athletes who use them.

This is a thriving, massive industry. Names like Garmin lead the market, all offering an wide selection of different devices to fit a variety of needs. Based on how advanced the device you choose, costs can start from a hundred pounds to thousands of pounds.

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

"It provides solace… It feels like a supporter supporting me."

"Please don't notify me about a poor sleep."

Just some of the reactions I've received from like-minded tracker enthusiasts when I question what they feel about theirs.

The Monitoring Conundrum

My feelings on mine? Currently, annoying. It's reporting I'm off pace, causing me to question whether the trees I'm running below are interfering with my location tracking.

A vast number of us strap these compact gadgets onto our wrists and use them all day and night, ostensibly comfortable with the fact they're perpetually recording us.

Long past are the days when we depended on them exclusively to give us an rough count of our step count. Now, they can measure our nightly rest, blood pressure, oxygen saturation, our body battery.

It's a challenge to find a health indicator they aren't designed to measure.

But do they do what they say they do? And are the data points we analyse a faithful picture of reality? Do they boost our daily wellness, or do the plethora of measurements and motivational messages just increase our sense of overwhelm?

A Love-Hate Relationship

"I become a quite fixated with mine," one user reveals.

While she loves how her device monitors her workouts, she finds some of its other capabilities "daunting" at times - a feeling first discovered during a pregnancy.

Prior to discovering she could put it into a specific mode, her smartwatch kept telling her she was not being productive enough. In a new phase, the watch insists her she's had a bad night's sleep.

"I am caring for a infant, I don't need to be notified I've not slept," she says. "I know that only too well."

Couldn't she just stop wearing it?

"I could, I suppose, but I have this complicated dynamic with it," she continues. "I value it for its workout tracking, but I'm unsure whether all the other things it can now do is possibly excessive for me."

Inside the Device

Each model of smartwatch has its own proprietary way of tracking your vitals and processing your data, but the majority use optical sensors on the underside of the watch.

They usually emit small, green LED lights onto your skin which can detect capillary action, recording your BPM. More advanced devices measure changes in the bioimpedance that passes over the skin to gauge your recovery state.

Expert Perspectives

One expert says that for most people for smartwatches, it's a "delicate equilibrium" - while the rapidly advancing tech could potentially save lives, "detecting disease before we feel unwell", it could also turn us the tracked into the "concerned but fine".

He points out that the most advanced wearables can perform tests like medical-grade monitoring, which regularly monitor how normal the heart is. They can flag if someone is experiencing an irregular rhythm, where there is erratic impulses in the heart causing an uneven pulse.

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

But how to make sense of these figures is complicated. The expert fears that as further capabilities are incorporated, people may find it hard to fully comprehend their data.

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

A professor studying cardiology echoes this sentiment. A study into the effect of wearable tech on a set of individuals with health issues suggested a significant portion of those who were given devices to monitor their condition experienced greater stress and were "more inclined to use healthcare resources".

She observed a pattern with her patients - they noticed a alarming metric on their watch. They became worried. Their pulse increased. They got even more concerned. They looked a second time, and their anxiety went up again.

"Upon viewing data about ourselves that we can't properly interpret then, of course, we are going to want to know more," the psychologist says. "We look, we re-check - it becomes a vicious cycle."