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An atmosphere of feeling of anticipation. Apparent is the chilled vapour exhaled by my competitors as they execute the "about to run" shuffle on the starting line.

A quick flick of the hips.

I'm at my local 5km community parkrun and I mean business. It's almost time...

Hold on. I need to sort my device. As does the person beside me.

The person in the line sighs. I refuse to go until… done! Connection established, away I go.

In the mele, it's challenging to find a wrist without a smartwatch on it. And it's not just us runners who wear them.

We're witnessing a explosive, multi-billion pound industry. Companies like Garmin are prevalent, all offering an broad range of different versions to suit a range of needs. Depending on how high tech the watch you select, prices can range from an affordable sum to a small fortune.

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

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

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

Just some of the comments people have shared from like-minded smartwatch wearers when I ask what they their opinion is on theirs.

The Monitoring Conundrum

My current opinion on mine? At this moment, frustrating. It's indicating I'm off pace, making me wonder whether the trees along my route are disrupting my location tracking.

A vast number of us attach these small devices onto our wrists and use them constantly, apparently comfortable with the fact they're continuously tracking us.

A distant memory are the days when we relied on them solely to give us an rough count of our step count. Today, they can track our sleep patterns, stress levels, glucose levels, our VO2 max.

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

But can they do what they advertise? And are the data points we obsess over a faithful picture of reality? Do they improve our overall health, or do the avalanche of metrics and motivational messages just contribute to our everyday anxiety?

Addiction or Aid?

"I do get a a little preoccupied with mine," one user admits.

While she appreciates how her device records her runs, she finds some of its other capabilities "overwhelming" at times - a feeling that became apparent during a significant period.

Before she realised she could put it into a specific mode, her smartwatch constantly alerted her she was failing to be active enough. In a new phase, the watch keeps telling her she's had a bad night's sleep.

"I've got a young baby, I don't need to be notified my sleep was poor," she says. "I'm acutely aware perfectly well."

Why doesn't she just stop wearing it?

"I could, theoretically, but I'm in this push-pull dynamic with it," she says. "I value it for its fitness insights, I sometimes question whether the myriad other functions it can now do is maybe overkill for me."

How Do They Work?

Each model of smartwatch has its own novel way of monitoring your health metrics and analysing your data, but the vast bulk use detectors on the underside of the watch.

They usually project small, green LED lights onto your wrist which can observe capillary action, recording your heartbeat. More advanced devices detect changes in the skin conductance that runs through the skin to assess your recovery state.

A Fine Balance

A professor says that for most people for smartwatches, it's a "fine balance" - while the rapidly advancing tech could actually prevent illness, "detecting disease before we notice anything", it could also turn us device users into the "concerned but fine".

He points out that some of the latest wearables can perform tests like electrocardiograms (ECGs), which continuously monitor how stable the heart is. They can alert if someone is experiencing atrial fibrillation (AF), where there is erratic signals in the heart causing an arrhythmia.

This does not necessarily indicate someone is imminently going to suffer a cardiac event, but it can give an advance notice they might be more susceptible of a blood clot in the long term.

But how to understand these figures is not straightforward. The expert worries that as further capabilities are incorporated, people may struggle to fully contextualise their data.

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

A professor studying wearable tech agrees. Her work into the influence 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 increased anxiety and were "far more likely to use doctor's time".

She observed a vicious circle with her patients - they spotted a concerning reading on their watch. They felt anxious. Their heart rate went up. They got more worried. They re-examined the data, and their reading went up again.

"Upon viewing numbers about ourselves that we lack context for then, of course, we are going to seek clarification," the psychologist says. "We check, we re-check - it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy."