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A sense of building tension. Apparent is the cold breath exhaled by my rivals as they execute the "starting line" wiggle on the starting line.

A swift movement of the hips.

I'm at my local weekly parkrun event and I'm serious. It's almost time...

Wait a second. I must adjust my tracker. So does the runner next to me.

The person waiting sighs. I won't start until… done! Connection established, I'm off.

During the scramble, it's difficult to spot a arm without a fitness tracker on it. And this isn't only us participants who rely on them.

We're witnessing a booming, multi-billion pound market. Companies like Garmin lead the market, all offering an extensive array of various versions to cater to a variety of budgets. Based on how high tech the device you go for, prices can start from £100 to a significant investment.

"It makes me crazy, I'm unable to stop checking."

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

"I wish it wouldn't say about a restless night."

A handful of the responses I've received from fellow device users when I ask what they feel about theirs.

The Monitoring Conundrum

My thoughts on mine? At this moment, frustrating. It's telling me I'm off pace, making me wonder whether the foliage along my route are blocking my GPS connection.

A vast number of us fasten these little gadgets onto our arms and keep them on all day and night, seemingly at ease with the fact they're continuously tracking us.

Gone are the days when we relied on them exclusively to give us an rough count of our daily steps. Today, they can analyse our nightly rest, blood pressure, glucose levels, our body battery.

It's a challenge to find a physical metric they fail to monitor.

But can they do what they say they do? And are the data points we obsess over a accurate representation of our actual health? Do they improve our daily wellness, or do the plethora of readings and cheerleading alerts just contribute to our daily stresses?

A Love-Hate Relationship

"I do get a bit fixated with mine," an individual reveals.

While she appreciates how her device tracks her workouts, she finds some of its other functions "overwhelming" at times - a feeling initially realised during a major life event.

Until she found out she could change its configuration, her smartwatch constantly alerted her she was being insufficiently active enough. Later on, the watch keeps telling her she's had a bad night's sleep.

"I've got a six-month old, it's unnecessary for me to be notified my sleep was poor," she says. "I know that perfectly well."

Why doesn't she just take it off?

"I could, I suppose, but I'm in this love-hate relationship with it," she explains. "I love it for its exercise data, I sometimes question whether the additional features it can now do is perhaps too much for me."

The Technology Behind the Tracking

Different brands of smartwatch has its own proprietary way of tracking your bodily functions and interpreting your data, but the majority use sensors on the back of the watch.

They usually shine minute LED lights onto your skin which can monitor capillary action, identifying your BPM. Sophisticated devices detect changes in the electrical current that passes over the skin to assess your nervous system activity.

Expert Perspectives

One expert says that in general for smartwatches, it's a "difficult line" - while the continuously improving tech could realistically aid early diagnosis, "identifying issues before we feel unwell", it could also turn us device users into the "worried well".

He points out that the most advanced wearables can perform tests like electrocardiograms (ECGs), which constantly monitor how healthy the heart is. They can notify if someone is experiencing a heart arrhythmia, where there is irregular electrical activity 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 stroke in the future.

But how to understand these numbers is complicated. The expert worries that as further capabilities are added, people may find it hard to fully contextualise their data.

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

A professor specialising in patient behaviour echoes this sentiment. Her work into the effect of wearable tech on a cohort of heart condition patients suggested a significant portion of those who were given devices to monitor their heart health experienced greater stress and were "far more likely to use doctor's time".

She identified a vicious circle with her patients - they saw a alarming metric on their watch. They felt anxious. Their heart rate rose. They got increasingly anxious. They checked again, and their anxiety went up again.

"If we see data about ourselves that we can't properly interpret then, naturally, we are going to seek clarification," the psychologist says. "We look, we check again - it becomes a vicious cycle."