I love my Charge HR for this sort of stuff. It gives me data to double-check my sense of "Something seems off, am I always this stressed?" Days where I'm antsy all day tend to be days I have a higher resting heart rate. Days when I have a higher resting heart rate tend to come after a couple nights of less-than-stellar sleep. It's easy to guess that being antsy all day is nervous energy from work, but if it only happens after 4 days of 6.5 hours of sleep... the fix isn't to work on my resting heart rate via meditation, it's to get more sleep.
The great thing for me is that I have concrete actions that help fix specific biometric anomalies: going to bed earlier, drinking less/more alcohol/coffee, exercising more/less. I know I should do all of these things all the time, but being able to see the effectiveness of specific actions is really satisfying.
Holy crap. You may have just changed my life.
(full disclosure: I now work for Fitbit!)
For the record, there should not be any air hissing out around the edges of your mask. If there is, you either need to get a different mask or at least adjust the straps on your current one. My experience is that full-face masks absolutely don't work with a beard; a nasal pillow mask works much better, but I do need to keep my mustache trimmed short or it chafes a bit.
Also, I don't know much about the allergy angle, but you're theoretically supposed to change the air filter regularly; there might be filter options designed for allergy sufferers.
Intersting. I've noticed a similar thing but with the step counter on my iPhone. My mood heavily influences them. If it's good I'll walk more but when I'm depressed significantly less. It was also useful at tracking my progress out of an illness as when the illness began my steps dropped to practically nothing and the slowly day-by-day increased over a couple of months back to the level they were at before. I've used it for something like this a few times.
Yep looks like my 'parenting two kids under 3' sleeping hours.
> It gives me data to double-check my sense of "Something seems off, am I always this stressed?"
My resting heart rate went up 15% when I had a cold last year - starting two days before I felt any symptoms: http://i.imgur.com/X7vEFsC.png
It probably diverges at some point. I don't think I have to worry about college applications when my dog is 2.5 years old, but who knows?
(I guess if I'd ever get a dog I'd get us both activity trackers so I could correlate the data.)
If you're ever thinking about a dog, this period actually only lasts about a month. After that, the dog starts sleeping through the night, so I now have this pattern that's almost perfectly correlated with when I go to bed. The dog means I always wake up between 7 and 8 AM.
Its sleep stats are also laughable. It's shown me as sleeping right through the time I was showering and cooking breakfast.
Koby's tweet shows what a breakup looks like, and it's tragic, but if you imagined someone retrospectively posting a screenshot of their heart rate readings from the day they met their current partner, we might see a similar pattern of elevated readings as well, wouldn't we? It seems like it would be just as plausible (to me, anyway).
I'm not saying that we should find better dimensions to measure (I think we'll always find ambiguous, confusing results absent context), but that whatever we measure should get qualitative context if we want it to really mean anything.
You show up a few minutes early to the restaurant and your fitbit can just let you know what's about to happen.
Dear Customer,
We are sorry for improperly sending out the "Broken
Heart" alert to you on January 21, 2023. We should
have sent you the "She's Pregnant" alert. In the
future, please ensure both you and your dating partners
are running the same OS version. Thank you for your
understanding.
sorry,
FizzyBaneFitnessCory Doctorow or William Gibson: if you guys are looking for story ideas, you can have that one for free.
I agree with the first part, but am not so sure about the second. If the breaker-upper doesn't want to break up, then I can believe that he or she will communicate more; but, if the breaker-upper does want to break up, then I can believe that he or she might withdraw and communicate less. (I'm not sure which of these you meant by "heavily weighted towards the side doing the breakup".) Certainly, I have seen both kinds of behaviour in my two failed relationships.
EDIT: As overcast (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10933670) points out, it's strange to speak of the breaker-upper as not wanting to break up. The distinction I'm trying to draw is still a bit slippery, but I guess I mean to distinguish between wanting to break up (where your partner probably couldn't do anything to convince you to stay) and feeling that you have to break up (where your partner might be able to change to convince you to stay). Jtsummers (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10933737) puts it better.
I was pretty sure that I was toast when she asked if I wanted to get dinner on Sunday and talk for a little while.
If you had looked at my readings that day, I would have looked like a breaker-upper, I'm sure.
Turns out that she was stressed about work and travel and after we talked about it a little, everything was fine. But damn. I really thought that was over for the better part of three days.
However, you'll see similar spikes from your partner before any major relationship event. They want you to meet their family. They need to tell you they can't stand your mother and her overbearing nature. They want to move in together or propose. All these would likely look the same (modulo degree) to Fitbit.
Again, I don't know what use this is, but physiological data is just fascinating in its own right.
http://news.mit.edu/2015/startup-neumitra-stress-tracking-we...
How do you like your MS Band?
It gets better and life goes on :)
In any case, I don't think this would be admissible evidence. As far as admissible evidence, polygraphs are only just scraping by on the skin of their teeth, and wearable devices don't come close to their level of accuracy/depth. The main reason these devices can be sold with none of the regulation that accompanies "real" medical equipment is that the companies state up front that "to be used for general fitness only, not intended for use to treat any particular disease", etc., and their accuracy reflects that. The heart rate measurements of Fitbits and other wearables aren't awful, but they're sufficiently inaccurate that any decent lawyer should be able to get that thrown out without question. Edit: Not to mention JTsummers' point about there being no baseline/control measurement on this data, if it existed. Definitely not admissible.
If you want something to be worried about vis-à-vis wearables and the privacy of health data, worry about your health insurer getting a hold of it and jacking up your premiums for not taking enough steps every day. That, to me, is the real worry here, not the cops.
The problem is that, as many court rulings have affirmed, in the US it's not "your" data anymore when it gets to the company's servers.
At that point, most companies will hand over everything to a politely-worded request, with only a few actually holding out to the point of a warrant.
I don't think that this will happen, but one can imagine solving this problem by subpoenaing your past FitBit data and social-media record, and correlating the two (by time stamp, which, if maybe not now, then I am sure eventually will be sufficiently fine grained to allow this). I'd imagine that it would be far more accurate than whatever calibration they do now.
So, the fundamental premise of the machine, that these physiological factors frequently change in response to peoples' thought processes brought on by particular lines of questioning, is true, but it's nowhere near reliable enough to be used as any kind of test. It'd be like a police radar gun that gives inaccurate readings for 20% of the cars, leading to both lots of unearned tickets and lots of speeders evading a ticket.
They're fine if you don't mind false positives (true statements flagged as dishonesty). This is largely why they're still in use e.g. for hiring with the CIA. It's much better to filter out many otherwise fine candidates than it is to let someone in who would lie at that point in the interview.
It repeats in each of the three services. :)
You don't want to lose a friend but it is in your best interests to do it.
Narm No: "@iamkoby Who initiated it?" Koby: "@NarmNo he did :("
Surprising lack of difference between sleep and waking if the only change was the breakup. Not doubting it, just interesting.
For example, here's what my heart rate looked like during the Game of Thrones finale: https://cardiogr.am/c/gameofthronesfinale
- Corresponding Facebook Post, Presumably