4 ms·
I wear a heart rate monitor when I stream videogames, and wrote a simple visualization sparkline/beating heart I could throw in as an overlay. I was surprised a
by Pfhreak 9y ago
I wear a heart rate monitor when I stream videogames, and wrote a simple visualization sparkline/beating heart I could throw in as an overlay. I was surprised at the variability of my HR in various situations, from lows of around 60 to highs in the 140s.
Even in 'normal' parts of the gameplay when I wasn't under stress I'd see my heart rate shifting all over the place. One moment of calm I'd be at 65, then 80, then 70. I started playing with it, to see if I could swing the needle with breathing, and quickly found that gamifying it led to my heart rate increasing when I was successful at decreasing it. (I'd get excited that I had lowered the rate, which increased the rate.)
I was also surprised to learn that my heart rate spiked significantly after tense moments in the game. In game combat usually didn't cause the rate to rise until 30 seconds or so after the combat started. I felt the intensity and the rush immediately, but the HR increased later.
I also found that games slowly lose their HR impact over time. A game like Player Unknown's Battlegrounds could get my HR into the 120s pretty easily, and now it only raises my HR into the 90s when it's tense.
It's fun to have access to all this data about ourselves, and I'm glad to see so many different ways of using it -- from dialing in a few extra % on your athletic goals to showing goofy SVGs over a videogame.
- registered99 9y agoCare to share the strap you used? I've been looking for a while and it seems straps are all over the place in terms of being easily accessed without proprietary adapters
- equalsione 9y ago> I was also surprised to learn that my heart rate spiked significantly after tense moments in the game. This is something called cardiac lag. Your heart rate takes time to climb to the rate it needs to match the effort your body experiences. Also, some optical heart rate monitors are poor at dealing with sudden spikes in heart rate so that might impact readings.
- oh_sigh 9y agoThat's not the variability the article is talking about.
- Pfhreak 9y agoYep, I guess I found the meta point interesting. Not only is the data available today, but it's available to random consumers very inexpensively to use however they'd like.