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There's a nervous excitement. I can see the chilled vapour exhaled by my rivals as they execute the "pre-race" wiggle on the starting line.

A quick twitch of the hips.

I'm at my local Saturday morning race and I'm focused. Three, two, one...

Wait a second. I must sort my tracker. So does the guy alongside me.

The person behind us sighs. I refuse to go until… there! GPS ready, away I go.

Amidst the crowd, it's difficult to see a arm without a fitness tracker on it. And this extends beyond us runners who wear them.

We're witnessing a explosive, massive industry. Names like Samsung Galaxy lead the market, each with an wide selection of diverse devices to fit a variety of needs. According to how advanced the device you select, prices can vary between a hundred pounds to thousands of pounds.

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

"It reassures me… It feels like a friend supporting me."

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

A handful of the responses people have shared from like-minded tracker enthusiasts when I ask what they think of theirs.

The Monitoring Conundrum

My current opinion on mine? Right now, frustrating. It's indicating I'm off pace, causing me to question whether the overhead branches along my route are disrupting my location tracking.

A vast number of us fasten these little monitors onto our arms and keep them on all day and night, seemingly comfortable with the fact they're constantly recording us.

Gone are the days when we used them solely to give us an estimation of our daily steps. Today, they can analyse our nightly rest, stress levels, heart rate variability (HRV), our VO2 max.

It's difficult to find a health indicator they don't track.

But do they do what they say they do? And are the data points we obsess over a accurate representation of the truth? Do they improve our daily wellness, or do the avalanche of measurements and constant notifications just increase our everyday anxiety?

A Love-Hate Relationship

"I do get a bit obsessed with mine," one user confesses.

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

Before she realised she could change its configuration, her smartwatch constantly alerted her she was being insufficiently productive enough. Later on, the watch insists her she's had a poor sleep score.

"I've got a six-month old, I don't need to be informed I've not slept," she says. "That fact is only too well."

Why doesn't she just stop wearing it?

"It's possible, theoretically, but I've got this complicated dynamic with it," she continues. "I value it for its exercise data, I just wonder whether the myriad other functions it can now do is maybe excessive for me."

The Technology Behind the Tracking

Each model of smartwatch has its own unique way of tracking your vitals and analysing your data, but the most use detectors on the underside of the watch.

They commonly shine minute LED lights onto your arm which can observe blood flow, identifying your heartbeat. Higher-end devices measure changes in the skin conductance that flows through the skin to gauge your nervous system activity.

Expert Perspectives

A data scientist says that for most people for smartwatches, it's a "difficult line" - while the ever-evolving tech could realistically prevent illness, "spotting abnormalities before we notice anything", it could also turn us device users into the "anxious healthy".

He points out that newer wearables can perform tests like medical-grade monitoring, which regularly 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 irregular heartbeat.

This does not mean someone is on the verge of a heart attack, but it can give an advance notice they might be more at risk of a heart problem in the years to come.

But how to interpret these figures is not straightforward. The expert fears that as further capabilities are introduced, people may not be able to fully understand their data.

"I'm not entirely convinced that the ability to monitor so much data is such a positive development," he says.

A professor focusing on cardiology echoes this sentiment. A study into the influence 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 "had a higher tendency to use doctor's time".

She identified a pattern with her patients - they saw a alarming metric on their watch. They became worried. Their heart rate went up. They got increasingly anxious. They looked a second time, and their heart rate increased again.

"Upon viewing stats about ourselves that we don't really understand then, naturally, we are going to want to know more," the psychologist says. "We monitor, we check again - it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy."