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A sense of nervous excitement. Visible is the cold breath emanating from my fellow runners as they perform the "about to run" shuffle on the beginning point.

A quick flick of the hips.

I'm lined up for my local Saturday morning race and I'm serious. It's almost time...

Hold on. I have to start my device. As does the guy next to me.

The person in the line tuts. I refuse to go until… done! GPS ready, away I go.

During the scramble, it's hard to spot a wrist without a smartwatch on it. And this isn't only us participants who use them.

It's a booming, multi-billion dollar sector. Companies like Garmin dominate, each with an extensive array of different models to suit a spectrum of lifestyles. Based on how high tech the watch you go for, costs can start from an affordable sum to a small fortune.

"It drives me insane, I can't relax."

"It provides solace… It acts as a friend supporting me."

"I wish it wouldn't say I've had a bad night's sleep."

Just some of the comments I've had from fellow tracker enthusiasts when I ask what they feel about theirs.

A Sea of Statistics

My current opinion on mine? Currently, frustrating. It's reporting I'm not hitting my target, making me wonder whether the foliage along my route are interfering with my location tracking.

Countless individuals of us strap these compact devices onto our arms and use them 24/7, seemingly comfortable with the fact they're continuously recording us.

A distant memory are the days when we depended on them only to give us an rough count of our pedometer reading. Now, they can track our sleep quality, blood pressure, oxygen saturation, our VO2 max.

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

But are they able to do what they claim to do? And are the statistics we obsess over a true reflection of our actual health? Do they improve our overall health, or do the multitude of metrics and cheerleading alerts just increase our sense of overwhelm?

Addiction or Aid?

"I do get a a little preoccupied with mine," a wearer confesses.

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

Before she realised she could change its configuration, her smartwatch constantly alerted her she was not being active enough. In a new phase, the watch frequently reports her she's had a bad night's sleep.

"I've got a young baby, it's unnecessary for me to be told my sleep was poor," she says. "That fact is all too clearly."

Why doesn't she just take it off?

"I suppose I could, theoretically, but I have this push-pull dynamic with it," she continues. "I appreciate it for its workout tracking, I just wonder whether all the other things it can now do is perhaps overkill for me."

Inside the Device

Different brands of smartwatch has its own novel way of monitoring your vitals and processing your data, but the vast bulk use detectors on the back of the watch.

They usually emit minute LED lights onto your wrist which can detect blood flow, recording your heartbeat. Higher-end devices detect changes in the skin conductance that runs through the skin to get an idea of your stress levels.

The Professional Viewpoint

One expert says that overall for smartwatches, it's a "delicate equilibrium" - while the rapidly advancing tech could actually prevent illness, "detecting disease before we notice anything", it could also turn us watch wearers into the "worried well".

He points out that the most advanced wearables can conduct tests like heart rhythm analysis, which regularly monitor how normal the heart is. They can alert if someone is experiencing atrial fibrillation (AF), where there is irregular impulses in the heart causing an uneven pulse.

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

But how to make sense of these numbers is complicated. The expert concerns that as additional features are added, people may not be able to fully understand their data.

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

A professor studying wearable tech agrees. A study into the effect of wearable tech on a specific group of individuals with health issues suggested a minority of those who were given devices to monitor their heart health experienced heightened worry and were "far more likely to use medical services".

She observed a cycle with her patients - they saw a alarming metric on their watch. They became worried. Their pulse went up. They got increasingly anxious. They re-examined the data, and their reading rose further.

"When people are presented with stats about ourselves that we can't properly interpret then, naturally, we are going to want to know more," the psychologist says. "We look, we check again - it becomes a feedback loop."