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A sense of feeling of anticipation. Apparent is the chilled vapour exhaled by my fellow runners as they perform the "pre-race" wiggle on the starting line.

A quick flick of the hips.

I'm participating in my local 5km community parkrun and I mean business. Three, two, one...

Hold on. I have to sort my tracker. As does the runner alongside me.

The person behind us sighs. I won't start until… yes! GPS ready, and I'm running.

During the scramble, it's difficult to see a person without a fitness tracker on it. And this isn't only us runners who wear them.

This is a thriving, massive market. Brands like Samsung Galaxy are prevalent, each with an wide range of different models to fit a range of budgets. Based on how advanced the model you select, prices can start from a hundred pounds to thousands of pounds.

"It drives me insane, I'm unable to relax."

"It comforts me… It acts as a companion guiding me."

"Stop telling me I've experienced a poor sleep."

Just some of the responses people have shared from fellow tracker enthusiasts when I question what they think of theirs.

A Sea of Statistics

My thoughts on my own device? Right now, frustrating. It's reporting I'm not hitting my target, causing me to question whether the foliage I'm passing under are disrupting my GPS connection.

Countless individuals of us attach these compact monitors onto our arms and wear them all day and night, seemingly at ease with the fact they're constantly tracking us.

Long past are the days when we depended on them exclusively to give us an idea of our step count. Currently, they can analyse our nightly rest, blood pressure, glucose levels, our recovery score.

It's a challenge to find a bodily function they fail to monitor.

But are they able to do what they advertise? And are the numbers we analyse a true reflection of reality? Do they boost our mental and physical wellbeing, or do the avalanche of readings and constant notifications just increase our daily stresses?

A Love-Hate Relationship

"I do get a a little fixated with mine," a wearer reveals.

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

Before she realised she could adjust the settings, her smartwatch kept telling her she was not being active enough. In a new phase, the watch frequently reports her she's had a poor sleep score.

"I've got a infant, I don't need to be told my sleep was poor," she says. "That fact is only too well."

Couldn't she just remove it?

"It's possible, theoretically, but I'm in this push-pull dynamic with it," she continues. "I value it for its exercise data, I sometimes question whether all the other things it can now do is maybe too much for me."

Inside the Device

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

They usually shine small, green LED lights onto your arm which can monitor blood flow, recording your BPM. Higher-end devices detect changes in the skin conductance that passes over the skin to gauge your stress levels.

The Professional Viewpoint

One expert says that for most people for smartwatches, it's a "fine balance" - while the ever-evolving tech could actually prevent illness, "detecting disease before we feel unwell", it could also turn us watch wearers into the "worried well".

He points out that newer wearables can perform tests like heart rhythm analysis, which continuously monitor how stable the heart is. They can notify if someone is experiencing an irregular rhythm, where there is irregular electrical activity in the heart causing an uneven pulse.

This does not mean someone is imminently going to suffer a heart attack, but it can give an early warning they might be more vulnerable of a blood clot in the years to come.

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

"I'm not entirely convinced that being able to monitor so many metrics is such a beneficial thing," he says.

A health researcher studying wearable tech echoes this sentiment. A study into the influence of wearable tech on a cohort of individuals with health issues suggested a noticeable percentage of those who were given devices to monitor their cardiac function experienced increased anxiety and were "had a higher tendency to use medical services".

She observed a pattern with her patients - they noticed a concerning reading on their watch. They felt anxious. Their pulse went up. They got more worried. They re-examined the data, and their reading increased again.

"If we see stats about ourselves that we don't really understand then, naturally, we are going to become concerned," the psychologist says. "We monitor, we obsess - it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy."