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There's a building tension. Apparent is the chilled vapour coming from my rivals as they do the "pre-race" jiggle on the start line.

A quick flick of the hips.

I'm participating in my local weekly parkrun event and I mean business. The countdown begins...

Wait a second. I need to sort my watch. So does the runner next to me.

The person in the line sighs. I'm not moving until… yes! GPS ready, and I'm running.

During the scramble, it's difficult to find a person without a smartwatch on it. And this extends beyond us athletes who wear them.

We're witnessing a booming, multi-billion dollar sector. Companies like Samsung Galaxy dominate, all offering an wide selection of various models to cater to a variety of budgets. According to how advanced the watch you choose, costs can range from £100 to a small fortune.

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

"It provides solace… It feels like a companion supporting me."

"I wish it wouldn't say I've experienced a poor sleep."

Just some of the responses I've had from fellow smartwatch wearers when I ask what they their opinion is on theirs.

The Data Dilemma

My feelings on mine? At this moment, frustrating. It's reporting my speed is wrong, making me wonder whether the foliage I'm passing under are disrupting my GPS connection.

Millions of us fasten these compact gadgets onto our arms and keep them on all day and night, ostensibly comfortable with the fact they're perpetually monitoring us.

A distant memory are the days when we relied on them only to give us an rough count of our daily steps. Now, they can measure our sleep quality, stress levels, heart rate variability (HRV), our VO2 max.

It's tricky to find a physical metric they aren't designed to measure.

But can they do what they say they do? And are the statistics we analyse a accurate representation of our actual health? Do they boost our daily wellness, or do the plethora of measurements and motivational messages just increase our daily stresses?

A Complicated Bond

"I find myself getting a quite obsessed with mine," an individual reveals.

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

Until she found out she could put it into a specific mode, her smartwatch repeatedly informed her she was failing to be active enough. Now, the watch frequently reports her she's had a bad night's sleep.

"I am caring for a young baby, there's no point to be notified I've not slept," she says. "I know that only too well."

Why doesn't she just remove it?

"It's possible, perhaps, but I have this push-pull dynamic with it," she continues. "I appreciate it for its fitness insights, but I'm unsure whether the myriad other functions it can now do is possibly excessive for me."

Inside the Device

Every device of smartwatch has its own unique way of monitoring your vitals and interpreting your data, but the most use detectors on the reverse of the watch.

They usually project minute LED lights onto your skin which can detect capillary action, identifying your heartbeat. More advanced devices detect changes in the electrical current that passes over the skin to assess your recovery state.

Expert Perspectives

A data scientist says that overall for smartwatches, it's a "difficult line" - while the continuously improving tech could realistically prevent illness, "identifying issues before we notice anything", it could also turn us device users into the "anxious healthy".

He points out that newer wearables can conduct tests like electrocardiograms (ECGs), which regularly monitor how normal the heart is. They can alert if someone is experiencing an irregular rhythm, where there is abnormal electrical activity in the heart causing an arrhythmia.

This does not necessarily indicate someone is about to have a heart attack, but it can give an preliminary indication they might be more at risk of a blood clot in the long term.

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

"I have some doubts that having the capacity to monitor so much data is such a beneficial thing," he says.

A professor studying patient behaviour echoes this sentiment. A study into the effect of wearable tech on a specific group of individuals with health issues suggested a significant portion of those who were given devices to monitor their cardiac function experienced heightened worry and were "far more likely to use healthcare resources".

She noted a pattern with her patients - they saw a worrying figure on their watch. They felt anxious. Their heart rate went up. They got increasingly anxious. They re-examined the data, and their heart rate increased again.

"When people are presented with data about ourselves that we lack context for then, naturally, we are going to want to know more," the psychologist says. "We check, we obsess - it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy."