Fitbit's 150B hours of heart data
finance.yahoo.com
finance.yahoo.com
And then there are weird situations while merely walking around where I'll see strange spikes (160+) on the Fitbit when I know my heart rate is near 90 or so.
Back then the conventional wisdom (not universally accepted) was that max heart rate was "220 minus age". Well, if you do that math on me, the peak -- not sustained -- rate that I reach now is outrageous, in a good way. Granted, I've learned to push through and perform at high levels of exertion and exhaustion, it didn't happen from one day to the next.
Anyway, there were times ~3 years ago where I'd be tearing up a workout, Fitbit would read 130, I knew it was f*Ing wrong. Bought a chest strap and saw what was really going on. Low 190s. Thanks FitBit!! I would have been happier if the FitBit just put up "??? WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING OLD MAN???"
(The algorithm that shows your weight has hysteresis built in, so that if you step on, get a reading and step off, then step back on with a 1- or 2-lb weight, it will give you EXACTLY the same reading. This is to fool you into thinking its accurate)
However for more intensive activities it seem like it can't keep up. I guess either because of sweat, or because of delays during processing. When I went biking with it and going full-out, the heart rate stayed really low for minutes, until it went somewhere in the medium range (still lower than it actually was). When doing something short and intense like burpees, it might even keep displaying the low starting heart rate, even though the actual heart rate is on the highest side. My garmin with chest strap does a way better job for these kind of activities.
However in total I still like the Versa and would buy it again.
Not too many people seem to care on the reading end, so I guess that's fine.
As another user (kaustyap) posted further below:
> It kind of sounds like marketing pitch by fitbit to let potential clients in health industry know that they have so much of data to sell.
Sounds right to me -- it's a marketing ploy.
In an academic or industrial setting, the data might still be useful, but it would have to get re-crunched with many, many more controls, plus sample corrections, cross-validation against other data, etc. -- than what the linked article does.
Might be because the obese Qatari aren't the Qataris buying fitbits?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Qatar
[1] http://gulfmigration.eu/media/pubs/exno/GLMM_EN_2017_03.pdf
If I talk ill about some political ideologies and that gets stored until some evil dictator gets in power, that I can get. But who is going to put me in prison for having a high heart rate?
The benefits in the other hand is great. I get to see and view my health improve or get worse over time and they can use my data along with many others to get patterns and help improve the health of everyone.
I guess what I am saying is that I don't really get the panic about giving up health data that is displayed in this comment section. I also own a Withings / Nokia watch together with a scale and it works great, have motivated me to get more sleep and exercise more. My experience is purely positive and I am quite certain that owning devices like this helps a lot of people get more healthy, detect bad trends etc.
I actually think the reverse could be true. If you own a watch, a scale etc you are obviously thinking about your health and prioritizing it. It makes little sense to punish people who prioritize their health and monitor it to evade bad stuff.
If I notice a bad trend I would do something about it, if it was my heart rate I would probably call a doctor and usually with health the earlier you identify an issue the more likely it will be easier to do something about it.
If you go with a bad heart for years it will probably be harder to get healthy after that and will probably be more expensive as you might require a surgery which perhaps could be avoided.
Companies will most likely use this information as selling points for their devices / apps. I value this information much higher than a small amount of money.
I actually looked into this in some (limited) detail, although for a slightly expanded definition of all data a Fitbit (and the near future similar devices) could collect.
Heart rate data has been used in legal cases in the past. In an insurance fraud case, heart rate data from a pacemaker was used to provide evidence the events could not have occurred as described [1]. Similarly activity data has been used to defend against a false rape claim [2]. There is no reason such data could not be used in any other legal case.
The data collected by such devices can also reveal much more information about yourself than most think. By watching hand movements via accelerometer, smokers can be identified with 95% accuracy [3]. Users can be tracked via Bluetooth identifiers, or via the unique walking pattern of each individual [4]. Even when encrypted, users can be identified by the frequency of communication to the smartphone. Furthermore, pins can be identified by monitoring users hand motion via accelerometer [5]. For more advanced next generation fitness trackers tracking your ECG, this has been shown to be as unique as a fingerprint, allowing individuals to be uniquely identified across devices [6].
There is no reason that this data could not be used against you via insurance companies to change insurance costs (smoker, type of transport, heart health, activity) or even force you to wear one much like some car insurance requires black box monitoring. You could be taken in for insurance fraud by saying you are not a smoker, or it could potentially be used against you in court. This data can also be falsified, meaning fake data could potentially be used against you.
In summary, there are many other privacy problems with fitness trackers.
[1] https://apnews.com/c55eac83846f42e19fb924e57917001b
[2] https://blogs.findlaw.com/blotter/2015/07/can-your-fitbit-da... be-used-against-you-in-court.html
[3] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ilaria_Torre/publicatio...
[4] https://www.dailydot.com/layer8/fitness-trackers-open-effect...
[5] https://www.stevens.edu/sites/stevens_edu/files/ChenWearable...
[6] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S003132030...
[1] and [2] sounds kind of positive rather than negative though.
Maybe smokers ought to pay more for their insurance? I'm not saying it's great that they can track people who smoke but the data could as well be used to strengthen your case, isn't that right?
I get it if you are an US-citizen and don't want to use fitness tracker that sends data to their servers but I am a Swedish citizen. I don't have a health insurance so I don't have to worry about any insurance company finding out anything about my health.
Maybe there are privacy concerns and maybe they should be addressed, but there is also most likely a lot of benefit to be gained from these systems. Just because the US has a crappy health system that exploits tech like health trackers doesn't mean that the health tracker stuff is inherently bad. Since I live in EU, I can also require them to delete the data thanks to GDPR.
TL;DR: I get the worry you may have as an US citizen, but basically none of these concerns seem to apply to a EU citizen that have universal health care.
You could pay more for health and life insurance.
My teenage son is in all likelihood a less safe driver than the average teenage woman, should a woman pay the same for her insurance as the generally more reckless man?
With regard to our health information, should we be keeping information from our insurance companies? Would it be right to lie about it? If not then should we hiding it. It seems that in this case we are taking advantage of others that will inevitable have to pay higher premiums to cover costs of those that are less honest about their health.
I bought a house recently. The owner didn’t disclose a crack in the slab. They had covered it with a recent floor covering that fooled both me and the inspector. Is that okay? Isn’t this similar to trying to keep a life insuance company from realizing that one has a significant risk say of a heart attack?
I don’t like companies collecting data on me, so if Fitbit does this I would hope that there was a way to opt out; nevertheless, I feel that we shouldn’t expect private insurance companies to charge us all the same. This leaves many people in circumstances where insuance would be unobtainable—a big problem where government could play an important role in a just solution.
If everyone wasn't so incredibly uptight about paying a tiny bit more than their fair share all this would be a lot easier. Would it be so awful if we all had to pay a little extra so that a smoker could afford life assurance, or so a young man could afford to insure a car?
Already sexist. Why not say "should a woman pay the same for her insurance as a man"?
If you are going to be sexist and agist for the sake of calculating insurance risk factors, you might as well be racist too.
“About 2 of every 3 teenagers killed in crashes in 2016 were males.”
Are they actually doing it? How?
I'm a big fan of Datensparsamkeit[0]. Either they actually use this data to further medical research (which is something that would be marketed loudly), or there is no basis to assume they maybe, at some point, could - possibly - do it. Beyond that, I see no valid reason why this data should ever leave my local watch<->phone network. All fitness-related functionality can be performed off-line. And guess what, when done off-line, you're not screwed if your hardware outlives the vendor.
--
https://investor.fitbit.com/press/press-releases/press-relea...
I guess you are answering your own question.
Whether our data is going to an evil dictator or a saint is not the first question. The first question is, do we know where it is going? Were we explicitly told, did we knowingly and willingly give permission (not tricked, as a footnote in 8 point font in a 50 page terms and conditions agreement) to use our data - that should be our first question. If that is not satisfactorily answered (not just this case), then the rest of the questions don't matter as much.
Even if the data collector's intentions are 100% pure (it never is) and it is used for the good of humanity (it never is) etc etc, it is still extremely offensive to take someone's most intimate data without them knowing and explicitly authorizing to do so. Even after that, there should be periodic independent audits just to make sure the data collectors hold their end of the bargain.
Oh, let's not hire this guy - high risk of heart attack (ski accident, substance abuse) - let's prefer this similar candidate...
As always the bayesian/multilevel approach could help: buying a Fitbit is a decision with information on your health-status in itself, model it likewise. Add information on weigth, BMI, activities per week etc. as indicators of in which class of users you fall (the uberfit, healthy, the aspiring, ...). Then use the predicted RHR per age instead of the data itself.
I hope they're actively researching their data set, I suspect we can learn a lot from it. They might even be able to detect certain arrhythmias, though that can't be easy with just an optical sensor which only reads HR.
With a user base this large, I'm sure people have died while wearing their fitbit. Maybe they could help predict/prevent the sudden cardiac death syndrome that many young athletes are afraid of?
I really wish scientist would stop “just sayin’” things like this. With all this value in data and possible contributions to the understanding of our vascular system, I find it quite dangerous to counter that with the suggestion that drinking alcohol is a healthy option to reduce stress.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athletic_heart_syndrome
I have personally found that average RHR per week tends to correlate strongly with my own physical activity. With consistent workouts, I can get down to 47 bpm. When my RHR gets above 55, I know I've been slacking off for too long (or it's an exam week and I'm stressed).
How many work outs or what frequency thereof does it take to notice lowering of your RHR ?
On a good week, I'll do 1-2 hours of cardio 5x a week, maybe with some HIIT thrown in. On a bad week I'll do nothing.
- RHR - https://ibb.co/gbbV2z
- Distance - https://ibb.co/gGtk2z
I do mostly running with some very infrequent gym and ski. There's definitely a correlation between activity level and RHR.
Weird, my morning RHR has consistently been 54bpm since I was eighteen years old, whether training for an ultra marathon, high-level bicycle racing, or sitting around being a (relatively) fat slob for a period of time. So consistent, that now in my 50s I just don't bother paying attention anymore.
As for the affect of exercise, one of the better bike racers I’ve known said his resting rate was never below 60. Young guy, too.
I was most surprised by the "Women vs. men, young vs. old". To learn that HR gets lower with age. Since old people die a lot. All of them actually.
Feels like a paradox since lower HR is associated with being healthy - and the rest of the graphs seems to suggest so.
It seems that they are referring to a maximum or a minimum in the curve, and calling it optimal. It seems to offer the hypothesis that a low resting heart rate (RHR) is good, and then runs with it. It does not explain how it arrived at that conclusion.
It feels that they saw that most people at a given age have a resting heart rate of X and therefore they conclude that this is optimal. However, I wonder if people with a lower-than-average or higher-than-average have a longer life expectancy. I understand that FitBit data would not show that, as the age-at-death seems to be one of the few data points they don't have :).
This is...insensitive, to say the least.
Measurements are much harder when the user is moving around erratically, such as is typical with exercising.
Source: I worked on a fitness product using optical HR for 3 years.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.repsi.hear...
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.supersimpl...
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=si.modula.andr...
For anything optical, you need accelerometers and lots of fun algorithms to compensate for motion.
Soon as the motion is something the algo wasn't trained on, everything falls apart.
My wife was worried her heart rate according to fitbit was high. Her doctor measured it at 15-20 bpm lower.
After she started doing up the fitbit band one notch tighter the average heart rate it recorded dropped 10 bpm.
They explain exactly this in the booklet it comes with.
If a sphygmomanometer gives an inaccurate reading because the doctor doesn't put the cuff on properly is the machine to blame?
I only say this because I've tested both a fitbit, and a garmin on each arm while wearing a chest strap and found both results to be within a satisfactory deviation of the chest strap.
Yesterday, my fitbit shows me I had walked 800 steps - I wasn't wearing it and it was just lying there on my desk. Bought it last Christmas, so it is not even a year old.
I didn't even bother testing the heart rate data
You should also try reaching out to customer support, we invest very heavily in being able to debug it when things go weird.
Please no. Surely nobody thought collecting health data from all their users was a good idea, right?
> That’s exactly what Fitbit (FIT) has done. It has now logged 150 billion hours’ worth of heart-rate data. From tens of millions of people, all over the world.
Argh…
> Fitbit also knows these people’s ages, sexes, locations, heights, weights, activity levels, and sleep patterns.
Just stop it already.
> Before you freak out: Fitbit’s data is anonymized. Your name is stripped off, and your data is thrown into a huge pool with everybody else’s. (Note, too, that this data comes only from people who own Fitbits — who are affluent enough, and health-conscious enough, to make that purchase. It’s not the whole world.)
"Anonymized". Just with the data posted above, it seems like it'd be pretty easy to correlate the data to a person. And auto-enrolling everyone who buys a health product is not an excuse to mine all their data.
> If you choose to delete your account, please note that while most of your information will be deleted within 30 days, it may take up to 90 days to delete all of your information, like the data recorded by your Fitbit device and other data stored in our backup systems. This is due to the size and complexity of the systems we use to store data.
[1] https://www.fitbit.com/legal/privacy-policy#your-rights-to-a...
I don't see any claims to anonymize unshared data. I just see "We may share non-personal information that is aggregated or de-identified so that it cannot reasonably be used to identify an individual."
If they want true anonymity, then remove at least location part of this (or say with 50km precision). Make it all optional with clear description what user opt for. And have independent yearly audit that confirms this on their core databases.
Anything less that that, and their motives are dirty as stale sewage waters. Why it seems that every company out there is only after as-much-data-as-possible from our lives, ideally all lives on the planet, to somehow monetize them in future? And ideally get bought by some big corp for few billions for owners.
Yet another useless thing I am happy to pass (and I am fitness nerd, but never saw any appeal in these measuring devices - work out hard, have fun, keep doing it often and you will be exceptionally healthy)
Because otherwise, that data has no business leaving my personal watch<->phone network.
I think this is a dangerous mindset to have, assuming that just because someone's bought a product, that gives the manufacturer license to collect data on my health habits. I would be much more receptive to an opt-in study.
Edit: Also, turn ALL of this into a single step, and make it easier to find: https://blog.fitbit.com/go-incognito/
Judging from previous performance of using statistical analysis to study health, I don't see it solving anything major.
Health is mostly a combinations of genetics and healthy routines.
People already have a good idea of how they could improve their routines/diets--they choose not to. Healthy routines are hard. So unless the massive data sets are related to genetics, I don't see them contributing much.
Also good luck "anonymizing" genetic data!
Sure, now that's there, it could be useful. But why can't we ever go about collecting such data the right way? Opt-in, and for the right purpose?
Sure, but that's application. Great things usually can do terrible things depending on application.
At some point we have to take a leap of faith and acknowledge that some things, like heart data ingestion, is an amazing advancement for humanity. Lets not try and stop it, lets try to move it in the right direction. Ie, not private, etc.
Yes... and no. Don't folks get insurance premium discounts for using one of these things? If you are poor and having trouble putting food on the table, it isn't much of an actual choice.
Yep. Location at 3am tells you where they live, and you're basically done already.
Disclaimer: I work for Fitbit, but don't speak for Fitbit.
EDIT: Actually there's an additional assumption here, one which I also make, that any app with location permissions has all my GPS location data. But that assumption may be false here. It sounds like where I'm sleeping at 3am isn't recorded according to https://help.fitbit.com/articles/en_US/Help_article/2134
Hospitals are allowed to anonymize protected health information in their medical records to mine the data (they can distribute it too) without the patient's consent. PHI is way more protected than consumer health information, which is what Fitbit has.
In the privacy arm's race, deanonymization will always win in the long run.
The best we can do is temporary privacy.
That goes against any progress that was ever achieved in medicine. Or do you have some way of reconciling that man sticking a finger up another man's rectum is good and private but keeping records of something like a heartrate throughout the day is ... im-private? ... and bad?
So either fitbit gathers this data or noone does. What will it do with the data? I hope it will anonimise it reasonably and puts it up on the internet for free but that's a bit unrealistic. I think it will pass the data to researchers, similar way other companies did in the past. That's beneficial in my book and I much prefer that scenario to the scenario where they just discard the data.
Granted it's not the same dataset as you'd get from a "Collect everything and figure out what to do with it later" approach, but I think it strikes a better balance.
For all we know, Fitbit's eventual plan is to sell their heart data to your insurance company so they can say "It looks like you have a higher than average resting heart rate and don't exercise much, we're going to double your premiums." Heck, maybe Fitbit isn't planning that, but they'll go out of business in 20 years and auction your heartrate history to someone else who does that. We have no idea.
[1] https://9to5mac.com/2018/09/01/apple-heart-study-survey/
Unhealthy people pay more (kinda fair don't you think?). Healthy pay less. Some have additional motivation to get healthier, because "screw the old me, I don't care about that looser... but if I move a little I can pay less now? Tell me more!"
Average society healthiness increases. Even worst scenario is great.
Depends. You can be unhealthy through no fault of your own (genetics, environment). From social utility POV, insurance is about pooling risk. Taking your scenario to the limit, if insurance company is able to compute an accurate risk factor for everyone and adjust premiums accordingly, then the risk pool evaporates. But then again, maybe health insurance shouldn't really be a private industry.
Risk is still pooled because payouts come from fees of the people that didn't (and won't) experience costly events themselves.
More information just makes the business more just and less random for insurer.
I've already done this. But that doesn't mean I can't call out potential privacy violations in other products.
> Also I'd rather have my data harvested for science and medicine than for selling advertisements or whatnot
Can you prove this? Even if Fitbit isn't doing this now, what if they're acquired tomorrow by a company with more relaxed morals on what is permissible to do with health data?
Not trying to argue, just pointing out that it's not quite so simple.
And all the "science and medicine" done by FitBit according to this article has resulted only in confirming things that are already known. I was actually curious what insights they discovered and there are none.
"Fitbit’s data confirms a lot of what cardiologists already know. But because the Fitbit data set is ridiculously huge, it unearthed some surprises, too."
From there the article goes on to list a number of new insights and potential research areas to pursue.
From a screenshot at https://www.cnet.com/how-to/count-steps-with-apple-watch/ the Apple Watch privacy settings let you turn step count and heart rate tracking on and off, but don't let you choose whether or not to upload them.
iCloud sync can be turned off completely on any iPhone. Anyway, I believe the health data is encrypted with some device-specific secret, but I'm not 100% sure.
If you have some sort of genetic condition, you're going to have to pay a premium. So while presumably you have some agency over how you drive, with health insurance you may be penalized for something that you have no control over.
https://www.healthcare.gov/glossary/pre-existing-condition/
>A health problem, like asthma, diabetes, or cancer, you had before the date that new health coverage starts. Insurance companies can't refuse to cover treatment for your pre-existing condition or charge you more.
In the US at least, insurance companies can charge:
Up to 4x the standard rate, based on age, so that an 18 year old working a minimum wage job has lower premiums than a 55 year old.
Up to 1.5x the standard rate for smokers.
Everyone's nightmare scenario about insurance companies using Fitbit data to screw customers is only possible if the Affordable Care Act is allowed to die.
Everyone else worrying about genetic data should also know that it has been illegal for insurance companies to use genetic data to set rates for years now.
For instance maybe insurance rates increase in a region showing a higher percentage of heart palpitations. I live there and now my rates increased even though I don't even own a bitfit.
Do you have any proof about FitBit selling to insurance companies? Not all companies are selling data to 3rd parties.
I don't agree and don't use their products. Doesn't mean I can't call them out when they do something I don't agree with.