12 ms·

Fitbit's 150B hours of heart data

100 points by napolux 8y ago

Tharkun 8y ago
A low (R)HR isn't always indicative of good health. High blood pressure can cause your HR to drop, for instance. 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?
- Engineering-MD 8y ago
  While you are correct, it’s not normally seen as an indicator of high blood pressure. The larger concern would be an arrhythmia or a form of heart block. These are definitely dangerous, but usually concern is only raised if symptomatic or the heart rate is below 50. Even in this case, a heart rate below 50 can be normal in very athletic people.
  - Tharkun 8y ago
    Oh yes, you're absolute right. I'm not saying that a a HR below 60 is abnormal or bad. I'm just saying that "low = good" isn't automatically true. AFAIK devices like fitbit have no indication of blood pressure (or heart block or certain kinds of arrhythmias), so they can't really make this bold claim.
- agumonkey 8y ago
  I'd love to see more information about blood rheology and actual flow versus extremas of pressure waves.
  - Tharkun 8y ago
    Wasn't someone working on a step-on scale which (somehow?) looked at blood flow in your feet and tracked this over time? Something like that might be able to detect plaque buildup over time. Not sure how accurate this would be, or how exactly this would work.
    - agumonkey 8y ago
      Never heard of it but interesting nonetheless. Time to google.
rawoke083600 8y ago
Now if only it were accurate...
- Bishonen88 8y ago
  Am a Garmin user for years. Was in a hospital ~10 months ago and was connected to a heart-rate-monitoring-thingy via a finger-clip. At the same time I had my Garmin Fenix 3 on my other arm. Was looking at the screen and comparing it to what my watch was showing and it was +-2 points at all times. Tried holding my breath to see what happens and both were almost identical.
  - com2kid 8y ago
    Optical heart rate when not moving is pretty easy to do. 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.
    - stephengillie 8y ago
      Even the phone apps work pretty well while stationary: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.repsi.heartrate&hl=en_US https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.repsi.hear... https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.supersimpleapps.heart_rate_monitor_newui&hl=en_US https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.supersimpl... https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=si.modula.android.instantheartrate&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=si.modula.andr...
    - lostlogin 8y ago
      My experience of hospital grade equipment for monitoring the heart is that it isn’t great with movement either. This was in an MR scanner (magnetic field and RF) so I ones milage may vary.
      - com2kid 8y ago
        > My experience of hospital grade equipment for monitoring the heart is that it isn’t great with movement either. 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.
saagarjha 8y ago
> modern smartwatches and fitness bands can track your pulse continuously, day and night, for months. Imagine what you could learn if you collected all that data from tens of millions of people! 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.
- tartrate 8y ago
  I wonder to which extent tracking data is really anonymized since users can still request to delete it, as described in the privacy policy [1]. > 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-access https://www.fitbit.com/legal/privacy-policy#your-rights-to-a...
  - jk563 8y ago
    If it's anonymised well enough it wouldn't be possible to delete it, which may well be the case.
  - brlewis 8y ago
    I work for Fitbit. I don't speak for Fitbit, but the web page you cited does. 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."
themmes 8y ago
> Europeans drink alot of wine. Just sayin’ 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.
- Tharkun 8y ago
  I don't think anyone was implying that alcohol was a healthy stress reducing option. I assume they were referring to the oft cited myth that red wine has cardiovascular benefits.
- Digit-Al 8y ago
  Maybe I'm wrong, but I'm sure that bit was a humorous comment by the author of the article rather than a comment by the scientists.
amaccuish 8y ago
I rather wish they'd focus on making sync more reliable. All my immediate family have Fitbits and no one's syncs reliably.
- sulam 8y ago
  We are actively working very hard on this! Unfortunately it’s the typical tech story — the system that worked well over 10 years ago isn’t working as well today and it’s a big project to replace it. We have a whole team of very experienced engineers who are working to improve it for all our devices.
  - amaccuish 8y ago
    Thank you! <3
koliber 8y ago
I wonder what they mean by "optimal", which this article seems to be mentioning a lot. 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 :).
wjnc 8y ago
They missed the sampling effect across ages. I've seen it in action quite a few times already. Prior: Conditional on Having a fitbit, the 70 yr old is a larger deviant from average health, than the 30 yr old. That effect could easily explain away the falling RHR with older age. The population in that age group is getting more healthy by self-sampling. The proposed solution in the article (the use of beta-blockers) seems inadequate. What proportion of the population and the Fitbit-users is on those medicines? (Article does mention some stats in the multicountry comparison.) 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.
kendallpark 8y ago
Yes, there are cases when a sub-60 resting heart rate is bad. For the vast majority of people, lower is better. The athlete's heart undergoes remodeling that is similar in outcome to pathological processes (eg, cardiomegaly and cardiac hypertrophy), but is in fact healthy, not harmful. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athletic_heart_syndrome 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).
- stef25 8y ago
  How old are you? How many work outs or what frequency thereof does it take to notice lowering of your RHR ?
  - kendallpark 8y ago
    Young adult. It takes about 1-2 weeks to notice a trend. I'm just looking over my summer RHR data and it pretty much matches my activity level. Steady decline in May and June when I was working out consistently. Steady climb after I injured my knee and had to lay off a bit. Decline when I got back on the exercise horse. Incline towards the end of the summer when workouts became rare due to wrapping up projects and traveling. 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.
    - ivelkov 8y ago
      Here are my RHR stats and Total Distance stats from the last 12 months: - RHR - https://ibb.co/gbbV2z https://ibb.co/gbbV2z - Distance - https://ibb.co/gGtk2z 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.
- mikestew 8y ago
  I have personally found that average RHR per week tends to correlate strongly with my own physical activity. 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.
lawlessone 8y ago
>The scientists note that Qatar seems to be an outlier. Seventy percent of the Qatari population is obese — yet their RHR is an impressive 62. How could that be? Might be because the obese Qatari aren't the Qataris buying fitbits?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- sndean 8y ago
  Also Qatar is probably a bit of an outlier in that 88% of the population are foreign workers [0,1]. Maybe the 70% obese stat includes only Qatari nationals while the resting heart rate includes everyone. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Qatar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Qatar [1] http://gulfmigration.eu/media/pubs/exno/GLMM_EN_2017_03.pdf http://gulfmigration.eu/media/pubs/exno/GLMM_EN_2017_03.pdf
mscasts 8y ago
While I am a privacy advocate in most aspects, I fail to see how my basic health data like HR, weight etc is going to be used against me except for bad marketing practices. 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.
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
  I agree, although I'm lucky enough to live in a country where healthcare is universal and not at the whim of an insurance company. I presume this is the situation for you too?
  - mscasts 8y ago
    Yes, that is the situation for me too. I guess if my healthcare was depending on my insurence getting through I would be more careful with that data but I don't think they would be able to identify me. 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.
- specialist 8y ago
  If my health data is so valuable, then I should get paid for it.
techstrategist 8y ago
Are there any relatively dumb trackers that can log only locally or to Apple Health without aggregating my data or storing in the cloud? I’d like to replace a Charge HR and have some activity tracking and real time heart rate.
- elektor 8y ago
  Amazfit Bip. Does pretty much everything an Apple Watch does for a fourth of the price.
wmblaettler 8y ago
I have to wonder about the "findings" regarding sleep of 7 hours being a causation for a lower RHR. Could it be that the cohort of those who are getting up early to exercise regularly are trading an hour of sleep in order to do so? To assume that "too much sleep is bad for you" seems incorrect given just the aggregate of all data with so many other variables.
faitswulff 8y ago
> And as for Pakistan, with the worst activity level and a sky-high RHR — get with it, people! This is...insensitive, to say the least.
finnjohnsen2 8y ago
I love this. 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.
kaustyap 8y ago
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. Otherwise It seems odd for fitbit to share this information with the author.
wufufufu 8y ago
Anecdotally, the heart rate data they have isn't very good. I had a Fitbit to track my HR while running, and the HR reading would change dramatically based on what I set my stride length to in the app. I would run on the treadmill, and it would guess how much I ran. If my stride length was set to a longer length, it thought I was an elite athlete and told me my resting HR was sub 50 BPM. If I set a normal stride length, my resting HR would be 60+. That's when I stopped caring about health trackers.
- noarchy 8y ago
  For me, doing hill sprints on a bicycle sometimes completely fails to register on the Fitbit. My heart rate will sometimes show up in the 90-100 range on the Fitbit, despite my Garmin (which gets data from a chest strap monitor) showing me 160-170, which is far more believable. 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.
  - thr0w__4w4y 8y ago
    I've seen the same thing. I'm a middle aged guy, endurance athlete, was competitive nationally at the NCAA level way-back-when. I learned a lot about nutrition and physiology as part of my sport. 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???"
- hammock 8y ago
  Guess what the digital bathroom scales are just as bad when it comes to body fat measurements, and even worse when it comes to weight measurements. (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)
jeandejean 8y ago
That's just amazing! Very interesting analysis of the data there.

100 points by napolux 8y ago

A low (R)HR isn't always indicative of good health. High blood pressure can cause your HR to drop, for instance. 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?

Engineering-MD 8y ago
While you are correct, it’s not normally seen as an indicator of high blood pressure. The larger concern would be an arrhythmia or a form of heart block. These are definitely dangerous, but usually concern is only raised if symptomatic or the heart rate is below 50. Even in this case, a heart rate below 50 can be normal in very athletic people.
- Tharkun 8y ago
  Oh yes, you're absolute right. I'm not saying that a a HR below 60 is abnormal or bad. I'm just saying that "low = good" isn't automatically true. AFAIK devices like fitbit have no indication of blood pressure (or heart block or certain kinds of arrhythmias), so they can't really make this bold claim.
agumonkey 8y ago
I'd love to see more information about blood rheology and actual flow versus extremas of pressure waves.
- Tharkun 8y ago
  Wasn't someone working on a step-on scale which (somehow?) looked at blood flow in your feet and tracked this over time? Something like that might be able to detect plaque buildup over time. Not sure how accurate this would be, or how exactly this would work.
  - agumonkey 8y ago
    Never heard of it but interesting nonetheless. Time to google.

rawoke083600 8y ago

Now if only it were accurate...

Bishonen88 8y ago
Am a Garmin user for years. Was in a hospital ~10 months ago and was connected to a heart-rate-monitoring-thingy via a finger-clip. At the same time I had my Garmin Fenix 3 on my other arm. Was looking at the screen and comparing it to what my watch was showing and it was +-2 points at all times. Tried holding my breath to see what happens and both were almost identical.
- com2kid 8y ago
  Optical heart rate when not moving is pretty easy to do. 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.
  - stephengillie 8y ago
    Even the phone apps work pretty well while stationary: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.repsi.heartrate&hl=en_US https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.repsi.hear... https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.supersimpleapps.heart_rate_monitor_newui&hl=en_US https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.supersimpl... https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=si.modula.android.instantheartrate&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=si.modula.andr...
  - lostlogin 8y ago
    My experience of hospital grade equipment for monitoring the heart is that it isn’t great with movement either. This was in an MR scanner (magnetic field and RF) so I ones milage may vary.
    - com2kid 8y ago
      > My experience of hospital grade equipment for monitoring the heart is that it isn’t great with movement either. 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.

saagarjha 8y ago

> modern smartwatches and fitness bands can track your pulse continuously, day and night, for months. Imagine what you could learn if you collected all that data from tens of millions of people! 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.

tartrate 8y ago
I wonder to which extent tracking data is really anonymized since users can still request to delete it, as described in the privacy policy [1]. > 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-access https://www.fitbit.com/legal/privacy-policy#your-rights-to-a...
- jk563 8y ago
  If it's anonymised well enough it wouldn't be possible to delete it, which may well be the case.
- brlewis 8y ago
  I work for Fitbit. I don't speak for Fitbit, but the web page you cited does. 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."

themmes 8y ago

> Europeans drink alot of wine. Just sayin’ 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.

Tharkun 8y ago
I don't think anyone was implying that alcohol was a healthy stress reducing option. I assume they were referring to the oft cited myth that red wine has cardiovascular benefits.
Digit-Al 8y ago
Maybe I'm wrong, but I'm sure that bit was a humorous comment by the author of the article rather than a comment by the scientists.

amaccuish 8y ago

I rather wish they'd focus on making sync more reliable. All my immediate family have Fitbits and no one's syncs reliably.

sulam 8y ago
We are actively working very hard on this! Unfortunately it’s the typical tech story — the system that worked well over 10 years ago isn’t working as well today and it’s a big project to replace it. We have a whole team of very experienced engineers who are working to improve it for all our devices.
- amaccuish 8y ago
  Thank you! <3

koliber 8y ago

I wonder what they mean by "optimal", which this article seems to be mentioning a lot. 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 :).

wjnc 8y ago

They missed the sampling effect across ages. I've seen it in action quite a few times already. Prior: Conditional on Having a fitbit, the 70 yr old is a larger deviant from average health, than the 30 yr old. That effect could easily explain away the falling RHR with older age. The population in that age group is getting more healthy by self-sampling. The proposed solution in the article (the use of beta-blockers) seems inadequate. What proportion of the population and the Fitbit-users is on those medicines? (Article does mention some stats in the multicountry comparison.) 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.

kendallpark 8y ago

Yes, there are cases when a sub-60 resting heart rate is bad. For the vast majority of people, lower is better. The athlete's heart undergoes remodeling that is similar in outcome to pathological processes (eg, cardiomegaly and cardiac hypertrophy), but is in fact healthy, not harmful. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athletic_heart_syndrome 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).

stef25 8y ago
How old are you? How many work outs or what frequency thereof does it take to notice lowering of your RHR ?
- kendallpark 8y ago
  Young adult. It takes about 1-2 weeks to notice a trend. I'm just looking over my summer RHR data and it pretty much matches my activity level. Steady decline in May and June when I was working out consistently. Steady climb after I injured my knee and had to lay off a bit. Decline when I got back on the exercise horse. Incline towards the end of the summer when workouts became rare due to wrapping up projects and traveling. 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.
  - ivelkov 8y ago
    Here are my RHR stats and Total Distance stats from the last 12 months: - RHR - https://ibb.co/gbbV2z https://ibb.co/gbbV2z - Distance - https://ibb.co/gGtk2z 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.
mikestew 8y ago
I have personally found that average RHR per week tends to correlate strongly with my own physical activity. 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.

lawlessone 8y ago

>The scientists note that Qatar seems to be an outlier. Seventy percent of the Qatari population is obese — yet their RHR is an impressive 62. How could that be? Might be because the obese Qatari aren't the Qataris buying fitbits?

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
sndean 8y ago
Also Qatar is probably a bit of an outlier in that 88% of the population are foreign workers [0,1]. Maybe the 70% obese stat includes only Qatari nationals while the resting heart rate includes everyone. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Qatar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Qatar [1] http://gulfmigration.eu/media/pubs/exno/GLMM_EN_2017_03.pdf http://gulfmigration.eu/media/pubs/exno/GLMM_EN_2017_03.pdf

mscasts 8y ago

While I am a privacy advocate in most aspects, I fail to see how my basic health data like HR, weight etc is going to be used against me except for bad marketing practices. 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.

SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
I agree, although I'm lucky enough to live in a country where healthcare is universal and not at the whim of an insurance company. I presume this is the situation for you too?
- mscasts 8y ago
  Yes, that is the situation for me too. I guess if my healthcare was depending on my insurence getting through I would be more careful with that data but I don't think they would be able to identify me. 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.
specialist 8y ago
If my health data is so valuable, then I should get paid for it.

techstrategist 8y ago

Are there any relatively dumb trackers that can log only locally or to Apple Health without aggregating my data or storing in the cloud? I’d like to replace a Charge HR and have some activity tracking and real time heart rate.

elektor 8y ago
Amazfit Bip. Does pretty much everything an Apple Watch does for a fourth of the price.

wmblaettler 8y ago

I have to wonder about the "findings" regarding sleep of 7 hours being a causation for a lower RHR. Could it be that the cohort of those who are getting up early to exercise regularly are trading an hour of sleep in order to do so? To assume that "too much sleep is bad for you" seems incorrect given just the aggregate of all data with so many other variables.

faitswulff 8y ago

> And as for Pakistan, with the worst activity level and a sky-high RHR — get with it, people! This is...insensitive, to say the least.

finnjohnsen2 8y ago

I love this. 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.

kaustyap 8y ago

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. Otherwise It seems odd for fitbit to share this information with the author.

wufufufu 8y ago

Anecdotally, the heart rate data they have isn't very good. I had a Fitbit to track my HR while running, and the HR reading would change dramatically based on what I set my stride length to in the app. I would run on the treadmill, and it would guess how much I ran. If my stride length was set to a longer length, it thought I was an elite athlete and told me my resting HR was sub 50 BPM. If I set a normal stride length, my resting HR would be 60+. That's when I stopped caring about health trackers.

noarchy 8y ago
For me, doing hill sprints on a bicycle sometimes completely fails to register on the Fitbit. My heart rate will sometimes show up in the 90-100 range on the Fitbit, despite my Garmin (which gets data from a chest strap monitor) showing me 160-170, which is far more believable. 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.
- thr0w__4w4y 8y ago
  I've seen the same thing. I'm a middle aged guy, endurance athlete, was competitive nationally at the NCAA level way-back-when. I learned a lot about nutrition and physiology as part of my sport. 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???"
hammock 8y ago
Guess what the digital bathroom scales are just as bad when it comes to body fat measurements, and even worse when it comes to weight measurements. (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)

jeandejean 8y ago

That's just amazing! Very interesting analysis of the data there.