Breakup, as captured by my fitbit | Hacker News Reader

Breakup, as captured by my fitbit

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251 pointsiamkoby132 comments

Getting a puppy, as captured by my fitbit: http://i.imgur.com/j9FTleb.png

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.

> 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.

Holy crap. You may have just changed my life.

The biggest change in my life from getting a ChargeHR was realizing that, after 5 years of having a child (and then children) in my daily life, I was wayyyy more sleep-deprived than I realized. The newborn phase was obvious -- you're having to get up every couple hours and getting back to having a "full" night's sleep feels really awesome. But it turns out I _never_ got back to a full night's sleep, because having kids means I wake up earlier than I used to and the result is that I was constantly getting about 30 minutes less sleep than I really needed. I made a change to when I go to bed, and after 4 or 5 days of really getting a lot of sleep it was like going from a foggy day to sunshine in my mind.

(full disclosure: I now work for Fitbit!)

32 years old, only recently made the connection between poor moods and mental acuity and a series of nights with less than 8 hours sleep. :/

8 hours sleep seems like bliss to me. Even if I actually get to bed giving me enough time to have 8 hours sleep, I usually have trouble drifting off and then when I do, I'll wake a few hours later, and repeat.

I find that there is so much stimulation throughout the day, so many things I want to read about, experiment with and work related problems to solve, I really struggle to switch off at the end of the day. I try to console myself with this - http://www.wsj.com/articles/sleep-experts-close-in-on-the-op... 7 hours is better than 8 :-)

Welcome to my sleep-apnea life. The CPAP is only partially effective due to (surprise, surprise) a new allergy to... well, everything airborne, seemingly, including house dust... and even though Allegra does a decent job, sometimes I unconsciously take the thing off in my sleep, and proceed to have a much shittier sleep: http://i.imgur.com/f9oHjqQ.png

Do you have the latest CPAP machine? The latest generation is a dramatic improvement over the older generations, especially with the exhale relief, this yields less discomfort and more compliance. I can't recommend it enough.

Any particular suggestions? I need to go shopping soon.

I swear by my Resmed AutoSet S10. They have too many S10 models, so be sure to get the AutoSet (or higher), as it dials the pressure up and down. I'm kicking myself for sticking with an older S8 model for far too long, all the misery I endured was entirely unnecessary!

Proper pressure is the key to compliance. This machine has auto-set, so the minimal required pressure is used; it has better algorithms for it (compared to S8); and it has exhale relief (it drops the pressure when you start exhaling). It's easier to exhale, thus reducing the overall pressure.

An additional way to reduce the pressure is a neck pillow. I use one with a silly name of Dr Dakota. Aside from keeping your chin from falling down, it keeps your neck straight, and so it opens up the airways. It's a big deal if you have bad posture, like I do. This was a dramatic improvement for me.

Further, reducing the pressure will reduce leaks, and thus reduce pressure further, as the machine won't need to compensate as much. A virtuous cycle, if there ever was one.

And lastly, reducing the pressure allowed me to use a nasal pillow mask, which is very comfy, easy to maintain, and has the lowest leaks of all designs I have tried. I can't use it at high pressure due to mouth leaks, but I can handle it at the low pressure, and due to mostly zero leaks now ... the pressure goes down even more.

Combining all of these, I brought my leaks to zero (like, 90%th percentile), and AHI to less than one, like 0.6 is in there most of the time. That's only one event per the 90-minute sleep cycle.

Good luck!

Thanks for the extensive answer! I did an at-home CPAP trial after a sleep and they gave me some POS machine and I hated it. Unfortunately getting anything more fancy is going to require jumping through insurance hoops. rolleyes Pretty new to this whole thing.

My posture definitely makes a big difference, I'm at 9 AHI sleeping on my side but 50+ on my back untreated. I'm gonna duct tape pillows to myself or something. Glad you found something that works for you!

> and they gave me some POS machine and I hated it

I really hate that they do this. I had a friend who also got stuck with the same situation and did not have a good experience as a result. They should send you home to try the top-of-the-line model and then let you duke it out with your insurance company! ;)

Pay cash. You can get a refurb at $600. It's totally worth it.

Speaking side-sleeping, I have sewn a sock with a tennis ball to the back of my sleeping tshirt. It worked well, but it's hard to wash. So I bought this contraption: https://www.amazon.com/stream/ref=nav_upnav_mobile_T2_Detail...

Side-sleeping is a big deal, but it's even better with a neck pillow.

Better link, I hope. https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00DTLLYQ6/

Believe it or not, I also snore on my side. sigh

Of corse. But a better question to ask is if your AHI takes a plunge. If it goes down from 20 to 10 for example you are halfway there to control your apnea.

A good CPAP machine will tell you what your AHI is. Even the S8 does, though you have to get to the system menu (hold down and right arrows for five seconds).

Where do you get refurbs?

I saw some on google shopping. Didn't try ordering though.

Also, check craigslist. In Seattle there are several people selling them right now at $400.

Mine's about 4 years old or so (?), perhaps I need to upgrade.

yeah, the newer ResMeds do look quite a bit more high-tech lol. I have a ResMed S8 Elite (https://www.google.com/search?q=resmed+S8&tbm=isch) with humidifier (the latter DOES make a noticeable difference).

I had an s8 as well until recently. S10 is much better.

What is "exhale relief"? A reduced PEEP?

See my long reply to a sibling comment.

Yeah, it sounds like it's a dynamic PEEP adjustment.

I don't know if this helps, but most people have to try a few different CPAP masks before they find one that's really comfortable for them. This is pretty much the normal usage pattern, and most insurance that covers CPAP at all also cover multiple masks, so I don't know why doctors don't push it more.

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.

Nasal pillow mask is (relatively) the bomb IMHO. Don't even try anything else, you will be disappointed.

Good point about the air filter; I need to get a new one

You might also try being rigorous about regular cleaning, if you don't already. In theory you're supposed to thoroughly clean the hose, mask, and reservoir daily. I'm lucky if I manage it every other month, and it works fine for me, but I don't have any major allergies.

That's crazy. My restlessness graphs don't look much different than yours -- is the sleep apnea what's waking you up after 5-6 hours?

If you wake up after 5 or 6 hours well-rested, that's all you needed.

If you feel like shit when you awake, and yet can't go back to sleep to catch up on the deficit, then you may have some variety of mood-affective disorder. The excess adrenaline makes and keeps you awake as soon as you rested a little bit in the first 5-6 hours. It also makes you dehydrated, and longer-term it forms a vicious cycle due to accumulated sleep deficit. This condition requires attention of a medical professional, which I am not.

I'm... not sure. Sometimes I have trouble falling asleep (insomnia), although SOME of that can probably be attributed to late-night device usage (I use Flux, but the iPhone won't have "time-based screen yellowing" until the next iOS release.) My girlfriend, who sleeps in the same bed as me, also gets up around 6, and sometimes that wakes me (not most of the time, fortunately).

Seriously. I sleep like a baby and often show 30+ times restless.

There is research that shows that at least with outcomes measured by BP, CPAP and mandibular devices are almost as good: http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=2473494

That's fine for BP, but what about elevated cortisol levels as a result of repeated breath cessation? In my case a MAD was not helpful, unfortunately

>> "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?""

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.

> Getting a puppy

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

Based on parallel experiences, having a puppy is like having a kid, except that the puppy is on dog-years time. They first sleep through the night after a month instead of 7, they start to talk back and push limit at 3 months instead of 2 years, ... and whatever else comes after that, since my dog is only 4.5 months old!

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?

Dies the Fitbit track stress levels as a metric, or is it just heart rate?

Just heart rate - I believe it's logged at 5-second intervals during rest, and 1-second intervals during physical activity. I'm trying to get Python Fitbit working to download my HR data but am having API issues: http://python-fitbit.readthedocs.org/

I've got https://github.com/magnific0/FitBit.py working (with a minor tweak - the refresh token path is missing a "return", it seems) for downloading my heart rate data. Works great.

https://rjp.is/experiments/heartrate/buckets5.html https://rjp.is/experiments/heartrate/minsum.html

Drop me a note (contacts in profile) if you want a copy before I get around to github'ing the changes.

Exciting chart! I'm curious: are Nov 14/15 outliers or did you really manage to return to your previous sleeping time suddenly after two weeks? (If so, how?) (Might be too personal to ask?)

(I guess if I'd ever get a dog I'd get us both activity trackers so I could correlate the data.)

My wife and I traded off nighttime / early morning duties, and those were nights where I was so zonked she took both. They were glorious.

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.

I once left my fitbit in the wash (and then dryer) and was wondering why I was suddenly getting all these "congrats on hitting your steps goal!" alerts on my phone.

Got a badge for climbing 33 stairs + a plethora of others, while in actuality I was riding my motorcycle.

Mine has never registered a stair climb, despite my office being on the third story of the building, and I typically park on the 4th or 5th floor of the garage.

Its sleep stats are also laughable. It's shown me as sleeping right through the time I was showering and cooking breakfast.

That's not normal. You may have a defective unit.

Mine (fitbit one) seems pretty good on the stairs. It was 1 floor out over 125 going up and down the stairs in a hotel.

I think my best was 125 stories, over a mountain pass.

A few hours' ride is good for 10K steps. I don't know if it depends on the type of engine or motorcycle brand. I'd love to experiment :-)

I noticed the condition of the road had a significant affect on the readings. I think we could use supervised learning to perhaps determine different activities.

my truck runs on five of the six cylinders available to it, and shakes like it does. Holding the steering wheel with my left hand means I hit step goals like crazy.

Be careful about continuing to drive it like that you may end up wrecking the catalytic converter.

You're right to be concerned. I paid $1500 for it, three times that to have the misfire issue "fixed" (among a bunch of other delayed maintenance), and after the misfire came back I gave up. I've been driving it on 5 cylinders for years now.

If only I could find an "open loop" switch to just disable the engine monitoring. Everything runs fine in open loop mode.

That's an interesting puzzle. If you want my $0.02 cents on it check the knock sensor or unplug it for a bit and see what that does, alternatively replace ignition coil for that cylinder, cable, cap and plug.

Those would by my main suspects if it works well in open loop mode, knock sensor first.

If it runs fine in open loop mode, it sounds likely to be a bad knock sensor causing the ecu to think there's detonation and retard the timing to the point it doesn't fire at all. As far as getting it into open loop mode, unplugging the throttle position sensor or any of the other intake sensors (MAP, Mass airflow, etc) would probably get you there.

My wife put her Fitbit on the cat's collar after she forgot to wear it one day...

Wow , thought I was the only one. I accidentally left mine in the washer/dryer the other day. Was expecting it to be broken, it came out with 4,000 steps :)

It's always interesting to see qualitative stuff associated with quantified self; it seems like ultimately the goal is to lead a (happier|better) life, which is a very qualitative notion, but we end up turning as many things as possible into quantitative criteria and looking post hoc for some pattern.

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.

Perhaps if everyone tagged their breakup moments on their fitbits then fitbit could mass-process the preceding few months / weeks to find a common pattern.

You show up a few minutes early to the restaurant and your fitbit can just let you know what's about to happen.

Corporate -> Customer Communication

  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,
  FizzyBaneFitness

Or worse: what if it could only express it as a probability. You show up a few minutes early to the restaurant and your fitbit can only say, "There's a 35% chance they're about to propose, a 20% they're breaking up with you, 45% chance it's just dinner." Gah.

Cory Doctorow or William Gibson: if you guys are looking for story ideas, you can have that one for free.

Right and when they are stuck in traffic on the way to the restaurant while you are waiting, the "break up" probability goes through the roof.

I'll let in on a secret as to when a breakup is about to happen. Communication between the couple plummets, and is usually one sided, heavily weighted towards the side doing the breakup. Happens, every single time.

> Communication between the couple plummets, and is usually one sided, heavily weighted towards the side doing the breakup.

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.

The breaker-upper generally wants to break up right? I mean, that's why they are the breaker-upper.

No. Speaking from my somewhat limited experience with serious relationships [0], I can assure you that every time I broke up with a woman, it was not what I wanted. But when someone tells you something like, "I don't love you, and probably never will. We're ok, right?" Even though you may still desire to be with them (emotions are weird and annoying), there's no way to salvage that relationship. Breaking up can often be pre-emptive in dead-end or bad relationships to avoid further heartache. That doesn't make it desired by the breaker-upper.

[0] Those lasting more than a few weeks, or with a more deeply felt emotional connection. Most likely also a desire to have a future with the partner, and not just a series of dates and screwing and then drifting away to find someone new.

I agree that the language was a bit strange. I edited my post to try to clarify, but I think that Jtsummers (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10933737 )'s reply is probably clearer than my edit.

> The breaker-upper generally wants to break up right? I mean, that's why they are the breaker-upper.

People can have mixed feelings about a relationship/SO, especially as the relationship ends.

Speaking of analysing large numbers of health trackers, there was that time Jawbone used its data to figure out which areas were woken up by an earthquake: https://jawbone.com/blog/napa-earthquake-effect-on-sleep/

How about an iwatch app that tracks if two people meeting are attracted to each other? Location aware Tindr for your heart beat. There's probably pretty huge potential for fuck-ups if you don't get it right though.

That sounds like an excellent way to freak people out and preemptively break up.

It absolutely could. This past weekend I was really worried about getting broken up with. My gf had been withdrawn and was communicating less and acting awkward in various noticeable ways that I interpreted from experience as an impending breakup, especially since she was just about to leave for a week to go to Brazil for a week with 3 single girlfriends who want to party.

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.

She probably chickened out at the last minute. Don't worry, she'll work up the nerve one of these days... ;-)

Except it wouldn't work. If Fitbit is collecting my data, and I'm not intending a breakup, then my heart rate now is independent of what my partner will be doing or saying in five minutes when they break up with me. It'd only really be useful if it collected your partner's data and fed it to you.

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.

Given that these gadgets will probably all be location aware, I'm pretty sure the company[1] can figure out who you're dating and what stress they have. Basically, triggering your reaction to the breakup will probably get a search on what your former significant other was feeling and the data processing would probably happen from that end.

I really don't want to deal with that world.

1) both people need to be using the same device, but that's probably more common than not with peer groups. Lord help us all if they come up with a standard exchange protocol between devices. The alert "Hey, the dude entering the room now is really mad" is going to set off all kinds of hell.

Again, though, it only indicates that your partner is stressed, and potentially that they're stressed about the encounter they're about to have with you. It doesn't measure enough (assuming there's enough to measure) to know the difference between "He's going to break up with you." and "He's been fired and doesn't know how to tell you."

I would imagine that's true in the current iteration, but I'm not so sure it will stay true. I'm also not sure how much external data they can get their hands on to start looking at connections with other parts of your life. Target's little snafu with telling a father his daughter was pregnant has made me think a lot more about sensors combined with big data.

That's a fair point. A lot of behavioral data can be gleaned from collecting someone's shopping habits, browsing behavior, general communication trends on various platforms (directed or not to their partner).

The heart rate and biometrics would perhaps let you know the when of the event, then, and not that it was on its way. The same predictive techniques could work for other events as well (has he been buying a lot more home goods recently? maybe he's about to ask you to move in).

Not a Fitbit, but I do have a Microsoft Band, which tracks, among other things, your galvanic skin response. I still haven't found any real use for this data, but I have noted that resistivity definitely plummets in response to stressful events, even if I'm not sweating enough to consciously notice it. I once looked at the daily graph and noticed a dip right when our application started throwing errors while I was on-call :)

Again, I don't know what use this is, but physiological data is just fascinating in its own right.

Isn't that basically what scientology e-meters are? I didn't know they had any relation to real life events.

Core biological response that we've been looking at!

http://news.mit.edu/2015/startup-neumitra-stress-tracking-we...

How do you like your MS Band?

Breakup, as captured by my fitbit aria scale http://imgur.com/ePX7o8m

It gets better and life goes on :)

This is fascinating (and sad), but it makes me wonder, could police use your fitness tracker as a sort of poor-mans polygraph? i.e. interview a subject normally, and then get a warrant (or not get a warrant) to view the online data and correlate them after the fact? Wikipedia mentions "blood pressure, pulse, respiration, and skin conductivity" as parameters for a polygraph [1], and while fitbit only supports 2/4 right now, the goal of fitness tracking is to have all of those. Whether or not polygraphs even work is another question, but being able to do them secretly and without consent is scary none the less.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polygraph

I can sort of see that as a concern, but... why on earth would you wear your Fitbit to a police interview? If I ever got hauled in for questioning by the cops, then guilty or innocent I would definitely not be wearing something that tracks my heart rate!

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.

But perhaps you were wearing it while murdering your neighbour. By itself it should be circumstantial evidence at best, but it could possibly help pointing the police in the right direction.

It'd almost certainly require consent or a warrant to get the data (in the US). But it would have a problem that polygraphs (presumably) attempt to handle. You have no baseline questions and timeline. A stressed individual (being interviewed by the police would be stressful) will look different from an unstressed individual. Without the control questions at the start, you have no basis to draw conclusions from.

> It'd almost certainly require consent or a warrant to get the data (in the US).

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.

> You have no baseline questions and timeline.

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.

Yeah. Protomyth made the point about aggregating biometric data with other data (shopping, akin to the Target pregnancy notice letter, browsing, etc.). That could be effective, if the sensors and social media, shopping, other data were available.

I know everyone (or most people) get hunches about what's going to happen by observing other people's behavior. Whether it was predicting a break-up, guessing that someone was pregnant, or in a new relationship. The glut of data available now would likely reveal a lot if we allowed it to be aggregated.

I guess I shouldn't have thought so narrowly about just biometrics (and heart rates, in particular).

My understanding is that polygraphs absolutely DO work, but they're not that reliable, and they don't work correctly for everyone which is why they're inadmissible as evidence in any decent jurisdiction. Worse, people who are good liars and people who have trained for the test can beat it, and those are frequently the people you want to catch with the test, so all you're doing is scaring and harassing the honest people, because they get the opposite problem, that they fail the test because their nervousness shows up as lying.

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.

I think it's pretty widely accepted that they don't work as a "is this person telling the truth about _____"

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.

If I recall correctly also if you can believe that you can beat the polygraph then it won't work on you.

Considering how terrible polygraphs are, you could use any number of stress-related metrics for an equivalent level of information.

The polygraph is shit for chirst's sake. Clench your anus and it will mess up it up. Polygraphs have time and time again have been shows to be ineffective, and yet people still keep advocating for them.

Newer machines detect clenching and the practitioner will tell you to stop.

Interesting.

They are still useless things built on pseudoscience considering what question they're attempting to answer, and I find their use in court cases a blight on an otherwise advanced society.

My heart rate data has been similarly interesting. For example, I'm a musician for my church band. You can see the spike when I'm doing the lead vocals on a song I don't know that well.

It repeats in each of the three services. :)

That would be a great ad for this kind of device: the heart rate of <famous singer> before/during <awesome concert> :)

I'm beginning to warm up to the idea of a civilization-destroying EMP.

Hm, I should post "Secondary screening at immigration, as caught by my Apple Watch"

This just reminds me on how no one has made the killer app for all these sensors. It's just data, no one has shown me how to make myself better from all this data.

It reminds me of how, in response to the popularisation of the 'science' of graphology, schools popped up teaching you how to mimic the handwriting that a graphologist would associate with desireable personality traits.

Having gotten a fitbit for christmas, I was disappointed by the app. All this data, and they don't do any interpretation besides displaying a few graphs. The data definitely shows how my resting heart rate is affected y how many hours I slept, or how I exercised, etc.

Data (and QS generally) can't help you change your personality, your mannerisms, etc...but it might be useful in catching an underlying medical condition.

https://exist.io is attempting to solve this problem (no interests, just a happy user).

Looks neat - will have to see how it compares against https://gyrosco.pe/

Doesn't say which side of the breakup he was on.

I'm thinking the receiving end. I would expect a sense of relief in the person doing the breaking and not the lingering effects.

I don't think I could ever experience just relief breaking up. It's never that black and white of "I don't want to be around them at all"; you invariably miss the person you were spending all your time with.

Be careful making blanket statements about things you can't possibly know. I've had breakups that were unmitigated relief, due to my having horrible taste.

Yeah that slower rate for a bit before spiking back up, to me, indicates the reflective questioning of "Why?" that would likely come about after just a shade of downtime.

You'd be surprised how stressful it is to break up with someone.

You don't want to lose a friend but it is in your best interests to do it.

Sure, but presumably there would be a pattern of rising stress levels leading to the event. This looks like a square wave, which indicates an instantaneous change from one state of stress to another, which would indicate he was the party receiving the bad news.

> You'd be surprised how stressful it is to break up with someone.

I'm human and 45, I'm really not surprised, but I'll play the odds on who did what to whom.

Um, did you see the guy's photo? I'm going to guess no one breaks up with that guy unless he does the old trick of acting like a jerk until the other person wants out.

Plenty of people that are attractive and good (or at least non-jerks) that get broken up with. They don't necessarily have to be a jerk, just not a good match for their partner. Politics, views on marriage, mismatched libido, kids, etc.

Some studies suggest we date people of compete able attractiveness. Whoever he was dating was most likely as good looking as him and would not consider it a blessing to stay with him.

I dated someone once who was really great, did everything right, perfect on paper. However we broke up because I just didn't feel anything, there was no chemistry and sex was boring and lifeless. Sometimes that happens and its nobody's fault.

It is true for all, no matter how beautiful - someone, somewhere is tired of that person's crud.

[edit: this is true for all sexes but I guess the unkind reader will think beautiful doesn't apply to guys]

He broke up on me.

That sucks, dude. Be well.

He recently responded to a comment saying that his boyfriend was the one that broke it off.

Narm No: "@iamkoby Who initiated it?" Koby: "@NarmNo he did :("

He mentions in a tweet reply it was the other party that initiated it.

If the side isn't mentioned then I'll assume he called it off. The increase in heart rate is probably from duper's delight

He'd have to be pretty cold to post this if the breakup was his decision and not at all mutual. His partner, or those in their mutual social circles, would likely see this. I'm not sure I like the idea of assuming the worst in someone like that.

See also http://www.wsj.com/articles/new-clues-why-women-get-broken-h... for occasionally fatal and measurable symptoms of psychogenic (or vagus mediated?) heart attack.

Looked like 'got up at noon, haven't been to bed yet' to me.

Surprising lack of difference between sleep and waking if the only change was the breakup. Not doubting it, just interesting.

Went back to the UK over the holidays - perhaps drank a little bit too much - my fitbit tracked my resting heart rate over the trip. It drops 10 bpm after I came back to HK. https://twitter.com/jamiewildehk/status/689726514959495169

Would an Apple Watch also capture these interesting moments the same as a fitbit? I don't have either, but find it quite interesting.

Yes—Apple Watch records your heart rate every 10 minutes during the day, and every five seconds when you put it in workout mode.

For example, here's what my heart rate looked like during the Game of Thrones finale: https://cardiogr.am/c/gameofthronesfinale

It captures heart rate at a much lower rate unless you indicate you're working out, so I guess if you knew it was getting to breakup stage of the conversation you could ask them to wait a sec while you start your workout

Something similar happened to me when I lost my laptop. For the hour it took to retrace my steps and find it my hr spiked.

I recently moved from a one-story apartment to a two-story house. You can't really see it in the number of steps my Fitbit says I took, but the number of flights of stairs I did in a day suddenly went way up.

"Had to break up with boyfriend over lunch, he was just too obsessed with his tech gadgets to give me attention."

- Corresponding Facebook Post, Presumably

relevant xkcd - https://xkcd.com/523/

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