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There's a building tension. Visible is the chilled vapour exhaled by my fellow runners as they do the "about to run" jiggle on the starting line.

A quick twitch of the hips.

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

Wait a second. I have to sort my tracker. The same goes for the person next to me.

The person behind us sighs. I won't start until… there! Connection established, away I go.

In the mele, it's challenging to find a wrist without a wearable on it. And this extends beyond us participants who use them.

We're witnessing a booming, multi-billion dollar sector. Names like Garmin dominate, all offering an wide range of diverse models to fit a variety of lifestyles. According to how high tech the watch you select, prices can start from £100 to a small fortune.

"It drives me insane, it's impossible to switch off."

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

"Please don't notify me I've had a restless night."

A handful of the comments I've received from other tracker enthusiasts when I ask what they think of theirs.

The Monitoring Conundrum

My current opinion on mine? At this moment, annoying. It's telling me I'm not hitting my target, making me wonder whether the trees along my route are blocking my location tracking.

A vast number of us fasten these compact monitors onto our arms and use them 24/7, seemingly at ease with the fact they're continuously tracking us.

A distant memory are the days when we used them exclusively to give us an idea of our daily steps. Today, they can analyse our sleep patterns, stress levels, oxygen saturation, our body battery.

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

But are they able to do what they claim to do? And are the numbers we obsess over a accurate representation of our actual health? Do they enhance our daily wellness, or do the plethora of metrics and motivational messages just increase our everyday anxiety?

A Complicated Bond

"I become a quite preoccupied with mine," an individual admits.

While she loves how her device monitors her runs, she finds some of its other capabilities "excessive" at times - a feeling first discovered during a significant period.

Before she realised she could adjust the settings, her smartwatch constantly alerted 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, I don't need to be informed I'm tired," she says. "I know that only too well."

Couldn't she just remove it?

"I suppose I could, perhaps, but I have this complicated dynamic with it," she says. "I love it for its workout tracking, I just wonder whether all the other things it can now do is maybe too much for me."

How Do They Work?

Every device of smartwatch has its own novel way of measuring your vitals and processing your data, but the majority use optical sensors on the underside of the watch.

They commonly project small, green LED lights onto your skin which can detect pulsation, recording your BPM. Higher-end devices measure changes in the skin conductance that passes over the skin to get an idea of your nervous system activity.

Expert Perspectives

A professor says that in general for smartwatches, it's a "delicate equilibrium" - while the ever-evolving tech could actually save lives, "detecting disease before we show symptoms", it could also turn us the tracked into the "concerned but fine".

He points out that newer wearables can carry out tests like heart rhythm analysis, which regularly monitor how stable the heart is. They can flag if someone is experiencing a heart arrhythmia, where there is irregular signals in the heart causing an irregular heartbeat.

This does not mean someone is about to have a cardiac event, but it can give an advance notice they might be more at risk of a blood clot in the future.

But how to make sense of these numbers is not straightforward. The expert worries that as more functions are introduced, people may struggle to fully comprehend their data.

"I'm not entirely convinced that having the capacity to monitor so much data is such a beneficial thing," he says.

A health researcher studying patient behaviour echoes this sentiment. A study 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 condition experienced heightened worry and were "had a higher tendency to use medical services".

She identified a cycle with her patients - they spotted a worrying figure on their watch. They became worried. Their BPM went up. They got more worried. They checked again, and their anxiety rose further.

"If we see stats about ourselves that we lack context for then, naturally, we are going to want to know more," the psychologist says. "We monitor, we obsess - it becomes a feedback loop."