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An atmosphere of nervous excitement. Visible is the chilled vapour emanating from my competitors as they execute the "about to run" wiggle on the starting line.

A rapid flick of the hips.

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

Wait a second. I must sort my device. As does the guy next to me.

The person in the line expresses impatience. I'm not moving until… done! Connection established, and I'm running.

In the mele, it's hard to see a person without a wearable on it. And it's not just us participants who wear them.

It's a thriving, multi-billion dollar sector. Companies like Apple Watch dominate, featuring an broad range of diverse versions to cater to a spectrum of lifestyles. Depending on how advanced the device you select, prices can start from a hundred pounds to a small fortune.

"It drives me insane, I'm unable to switch off."

"It comforts me… It feels like a supporter supporting me."

"Stop telling me about a restless night."

A small sample of the reactions people have shared from like-minded device users when I question what they think of theirs.

The Data Dilemma

My current opinion on my own device? At this moment, irritating. It's telling me I'm not hitting my target, leading me to doubt whether the foliage along my route are disrupting my satellite signal.

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

A distant memory are the days when we used them only to give us an idea of our step count. Now, they can track our sleep quality, heart rate, heart rate variability (HRV), our VO2 max.

It's tricky to find a bodily function they fail to monitor.

But do they do what they say they do? And are the statistics we obsess over a faithful picture of reality? Do they boost our overall health, or do the multitude of metrics and cheerleading alerts just add to our everyday anxiety?

A Complicated Bond

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

While she loves how her device monitors her runs, she finds some of its other capabilities "excessive" at times - a feeling that became apparent during a major life event.

Before she realised she could change its configuration, her smartwatch repeatedly informed her she was being insufficiently productive enough. Later on, the watch keeps telling her she's had a restless night.

"I've got a infant, there's no point to be told I'm tired," she says. "I know that perfectly well."

Couldn't she just take it off?

"I could, perhaps, but I have this push-pull dynamic with it," she says. "I love it for its fitness insights, I sometimes question whether the myriad other functions it can now do is perhaps excessive for me."

Inside the Device

Each model of smartwatch has its own proprietary way of monitoring your health metrics and analysing your data, but the most use optical sensors on the back of the watch.

They usually shine tiny, coloured LED lights onto your arm which can observe blood flow, detecting your heartbeat. Higher-end devices detect changes in the electrical current that runs through the skin to assess your nervous system activity.

The Professional Viewpoint

A data scientist says that overall for smartwatches, it's a "difficult line" - while the ever-evolving tech could potentially prevent illness, "spotting abnormalities before we show symptoms", it could also turn us device users into the "worried well".

He points out that some of the latest wearables can perform tests like heart rhythm analysis, which continuously monitor how healthy the heart is. They can notify if someone is experiencing a heart arrhythmia, where there is irregular signals in the heart causing an uneven pulse.

This does not necessarily indicate someone is imminently going to suffer a heart attack, but it can give an early warning they might be more susceptible of a blood clot in the long term.

But how to make sense of these figures is not straightforward. The expert fears that as further capabilities are added, people may not be able to fully contextualise their data.

"I have some doubts that being able to monitor so many things is such a positive development," he says.

A health researcher specialising in patient behaviour echoes this sentiment. Her work into the impact of wearable tech on a set of cardiovascular patients suggested a noticeable percentage of those who were given devices to monitor their cardiac function experienced greater stress and were "far more likely to use healthcare resources".

She observed a pattern with her patients - they saw a alarming metric on their watch. They felt anxious. Their heart rate rose. They got more worried. They checked again, and their anxiety rose further.

"When people are presented with stats about ourselves that we lack context for then, of course, we are going to become concerned," the psychologist says. "We monitor, we re-check - it becomes a feedback loop."