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Comment by source99 | Hacker News Reader

This article seems fake to me. The story feels a bit made up and the end reads like a tag line: "If you want to find out why I had the wearables on me — check out emozia."

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I had the same feeling, but not for the plug (I think I stopped reading before that).

> I want to experience life, I want to help people, build companies, have a family.

"Build companies". Now I do realised that some people really DO want to do that, I've just never seen it mentioned in stories like this and it was what made me a bit "uhh" about the post.

Wouldn't call BS though. But that plug at the end does seem a bit convenient.

The guy's a CEO of a heart rate company. I don't want to question his motivations too much, but it's obviously in his favor to publish something like this...

Yeah "first post on medium" should actually read "first pr piece".

Nothing wrong with that. It's doubly in his interest to publish this piece.

Yeah, my spider senses definitely alerted me to some "viral" fakery here.

to be fair, most medium articles have some kind of plug like this at the end

edit: what makes you think its fake?

The heart rate numbers themselves don't seem to make sense to me. 164 at the peak seems low for the drama/gravity of the situation.

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?

The timing of those events relative to his heart rates does seem like, at least, embellishment.

> 164 at the peak seems low for the drama/gravity of the situation.

Would you think it's more reasonable to reach ~190-200? (Assuming the writer of the Medium story is ~25.) My only perspective comes from running with my fitbit, where it's pretty easy to reach 170.

I'd say 200 is reasonable. 140-160 is jogging/running, which is not that fast. When you're about to die and fight-or-flight reactions kick in (i.e. your whole entire body shifts to "OH SHIT" mode), I'd expect your HR to be through the roof.

Yeah, for men, 220 - age is your max heart rate, in theory. And "going to die suddenly" = max heart rate.

The other thing that's bullshit about the graph is that there are only 4 evenly spaced data points for what sounds like a 5-10 minute encounter. Don't believe it at all, why wouldn't you show real data? Or talk more about the data if that was the point of it?

Everyone's heart rate is different and I don't think with any certainty you can expect to predict what someone's HR is in any particular situation. Personally my absolute max HR I've seen in my whole life is 166 yet I regularly cycle with guys in their 50s that can reach 180-190. The only way to find your max HR is by measuring it.

I'm sure you're right that the exact timing is speculation, but a peak of 164 for an active individual seems quite reasonable to me (he did state bus resting heart rate is 58).

It's pretty pointless stealing a modern phone without getting it unlocked, isn't it? If anything that's a detail that someone making up a story would forget about.

There's a huge discrepancy between your comment being second from the top, and where a similar comment would be if we replace a mugging with an anonymous rape threat, even though both are equally unverifiable and easy to find details that seem odd.

Sadly, the world as-is, I'll have to take fake PR piece as my null hypothesis. Comment by original author confirming the facts would suffice.

The world might be just a little brighter than your null hypothesis :)

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!

Thanks, here's my public apology. I thought I'd go an extra inch and buy one of your products, but fellback to requesting a free demo as it all I could do from the site.

No worries at all!! This is my first foray into writing publicly and I am learning a lot from this and other discussions! It's really interesting and helpful! I'll incorporate some of the input into future articles. I'll certainly be mindful that the audience might be much broader than originally intended and to structure the content accordingly.

Yes - there is actually no way to purchase anything form emozia right now, which in this context is really funny/ironic.

If it indeed were a marketing stunt one would think they would make sure the webpage would be online at that time.

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