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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.

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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.

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).

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... ;-)

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