Your heart rate at gunpoint

I went through a battery of heart tests that all turned up normal and I was diagnosed with anxiety, until years later when someone thought to test my nervous system. So yeah, I can relate.

But those heart tests even included wearing a monitor that didn't tell them anything useful other than that it was elevated at times... but not that there was a real physiological underlying cause beyond simple anxiety. Not sure they'd put any more interest in a Fitbit's data.

If I felt it was getting serious I’d look into a specialized device that can make it even more visible, letting me go to a doctor without awkwardness.

So far my arrhythmia seems like more or less episodical PVC though, if I interpret Wikipedia correctly. Happens reliably only during mentally / emotionally pressing moments, up to a beat every few seconds on bad days. Noticed that mild cardio, like jogging in place, helps ‘warm up’ the heart (feels cold during the episodes somehow).

I work for a very large wearable company so I have some knowledge of how heart rate sensors work

How did he know the timing of the peak? If he had a log it most likely simply had a time stamp of seconds. How does he correlate a random time stamp to the specific moment days after the event. Same comment about his heart rate hitting 130 when he shoves the gun into his ribs.

In general the story just feels fake.

Edit: do thieves really ask you to unlock your phone and banking apps? What app lets you send money that can't easily be traced?

I wrote the story first and foremost for myself, to get over what I felt was the shame of being robbed and powerless. So I started writing about my experience, what I learned and my takeaways and that process helped me forgive and move on! I shared the story because I thought it might help other people go though whatever difficult thing they are going though.

A lot of the story and a lot of details are not told in the medium post. The guys that robbed me are still at large and the investigation is still open. I hope to share more details in the future when I can!

i thought that the note about emozia was relevant to the story - since I don't think a lot of people in the general population wear custom hr sensors and analyze data coming from them. This was a post on medium. But it seems that the note bothered some people and distracted from the point of the story so I edited it out.

The case that I wanted to make in the article is live your life the way you want to live it, because knowing that you didn't when you run out of time is, apparently, really bad for your heart!

I hope you enjoyed the article and that it helped you in some way!

If the late killing really often happens, which I (not based on any data or anecdata) doubt, I would think the more likely mechanism would be that they decide up front, hesitate at the moment of truth, then realize you could recognize them later, making them go to jail for a long time, and then do it anyways.

Mind you, we don't know the heart rate of the robber.

I'm not saying it couldn't be done, but it would be very difficult to do in a way that wouldn't be noticed, especially once it became common knowledge.

You could force the device to self-wipe data storage after X minutes or force specific apps to 'crash' on open (email, 2FA apps, banking, etc.) where even offline access could be detrimental.

For post-contact response, maybe even an IVR system you can call (from a public phone or something) and give an audio or DTMF password.

(I'd also like to get my phone droned after I move out of danger close radius, or the civilized city equivalent (police/bike gang/etc. show up at geolocation))

When assaulted, just cooperate.

Passwords are the one exception to this. You can always confirm a password instantly from anywhere. But it doesn't need to be that way, you can have duress passwords. Truecrypt supports hidden archives, where entering the fake password unlocks a different encrypted folder with different files. The same thing thing is true on some "secure photo" apps for phones. For a phone, you would have a password that bricks the phone after a certain time limit, like 24 hours. But appears to work fine for the moment.

Murder rate is like 25x less, and even less common for strangers. (Though like half of stranger murders are during robbery, so yea, just do what you're told)

Thought personally, not living in the US, just the thought of being robbed is like science fiction to me. And it's not like I live in a great country, but things like this just almost never happen here. Gas stations and convenience stores get robbed sometimes, your apartment might be broken into, but someone on the street robbing you? I don't know a single person this had happened to.

Well, in most of the US, 43 out of 50 states, 5-10% of the civilian population could also be "well armed", and outside of (still) high crime areas like Chicago I think this sort of crime is much less common, and as noted by dvirsky the crime rates in general have been dropping for decades, although that's almost certainly more due to demographics than anything else (i.e. the population of young men).

My vision of a "sane society" is one where I don't necessarily bother with a sensor, although the data from one would certainly be neat, but one in which during a moment's inattention from the one with the gun, or when they stupidly ask me to empty my pockets, I draw my 1911 and give them some .45 ACP love instead of my can't lock in the first place feature phone etc. Assuming my situational awareness was so poor I hadn't started avoiding letting them get so close in the first place, a skill honed in the dozen years I lived as an unarmed pedestrian in the Boston area, yuck.

Before anyone goes off on an "oh, you're so deliciously macho" tangent, while you have to judge each incident by itself, statistically, resisting a criminal assault results in much better outcomes. If you live in Silicon Valley, well, it sucks to be you (even if this isn't your sort of thing, as it is nationwide for the 90-95% of the population who don't legally carry concealed, you don't benefit from herd immunity).

My aim, long-term, was always to lead a simple and frugal life rather than to try and amass as much wealth as possible. A small home, a place to grow food, a modest income from various bits-and-bobs of work.

But to do that, you need some money to start you out and that's where I'm failing. I'm out of the running for any professional jobs because of the break in employment and the competition for entry-level jobs is such that any slight gap in your employment history means you just get a "we'll call you back".

Having had health issues and a gap in employment history seems to mean I am no longer a useful or valid member of society. I wish I had died last year, so I wouldn't be wasting everyone's time and space.

Except a few other times, where my remembered terror was highest in the incidents where I'd had no real response or control, and really just remember the action in cases where I did have some level of responsibility/control. But that might be a failure of memory.

And not getting into bad situations in the first place. Avoidance is the best defence.

That being said, I don't think (il)legality would have a direct impact on how easy is to obtain a gun in certain parts of the world (say Brasil).