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There's a building tension. Apparent is the chilled vapour coming from my fellow runners as they do the "pre-race" jiggle on the beginning point.

A rapid movement of the hips.

I'm participating in my local Saturday morning race and I mean business. It's almost time...

Hold on. I have to adjust my tracker. So does the person beside me.

The person waiting sighs. I'm not moving until… done! GPS ready, and I'm running.

In the mele, it's hard to spot a arm without a fitness tracker on it. And this isn't only us participants who rely on them.

We're witnessing a explosive, multi-billion dollar market. Brands like Apple Watch dominate, featuring an broad range of different models to cater to a spectrum of budgets. According to how advanced the device you choose, prices can start from an affordable sum to a significant investment.

"It drives me insane, it's impossible to stop checking."

"It comforts me… It feels like a supporter supporting me."

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

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

A Sea of Statistics

My feelings on my own device? At this moment, annoying. It's telling me I'm not hitting my target, making me wonder whether the overhead branches I'm passing under are blocking my location tracking.

Millions of us attach these small monitors onto our wrists and wear them all day and night, apparently comfortable with the fact they're continuously tracking us.

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

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

But can they do what they say they do? And are the data points we scrutinise a faithful picture of reality? Do they improve our mental and physical wellbeing, or do the multitude of readings and cheerleading alerts just contribute to our daily stresses?

A Complicated Bond

"I become a a little preoccupied with mine," one user reveals.

While she values how her device tracks her exercise, she finds some of its other features "overwhelming" at times - a feeling first discovered during a pregnancy.

Prior to discovering she could change its configuration, her smartwatch repeatedly informed her she was failing to be active enough. Now, the watch frequently reports her she's had a poor sleep score.

"I am caring for a young baby, I don't need to be notified I've not slept," she says. "That fact is only too well."

Is it not possible to just stop wearing it?

"It's possible, perhaps, but I have this push-pull dynamic with it," she says. "I value it for its fitness insights, I just wonder whether the additional features it can now do is possibly overkill for me."

Inside the Device

Every device of smartwatch has its own proprietary way of tracking your health metrics and analysing your data, but the vast bulk use sensors on the back of the watch.

They commonly emit small, green LED lights onto your wrist which can monitor blood flow, detecting your BPM. More advanced devices detect changes in the electrical current that passes over the skin to assess your nervous system activity.

A Fine Balance

A professor says that overall for smartwatches, it's a "fine balance" - while the ever-evolving tech could actually aid early diagnosis, "identifying issues before we feel unwell", it could also turn us watch wearers into the "anxious healthy".

He points out that some of the latest wearables can conduct tests like heart rhythm analysis, which constantly monitor how stable the heart is. They can alert if someone is experiencing an irregular rhythm, where there is erratic 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 preliminary indication they might be more susceptible of a stroke in the long term.

But how to make sense of these numbers is complex. The expert concerns that as more functions are introduced, people may find it hard to fully contextualise their data.

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

A health researcher specialising in wearable tech agrees. A study into the influence of wearable tech on a specific group of heart condition patients suggested a noticeable percentage of those who were given devices to monitor their condition experienced heightened worry and were "had a higher tendency to use doctor's time".

She noted a vicious circle with her patients - they noticed a alarming metric on their watch. They felt anxious. Their BPM went up. They got more worried. They re-examined the data, and their reading rose further.

"When people are presented with stats about ourselves that we lack context for then, understandably, we are going to become concerned," the psychologist says. "We look, we obsess - it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy."