Getting a puppy, as captured by my fitbit: <a href="http://i.imgur.com/j9FTleb.png" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/j9FTleb.png</a><p>I love my Charge HR for this sort of stuff. It gives me data to double-check my sense of "Something seems off, am I always this stressed?" Days where I'm antsy all day tend to be days I have a higher resting heart rate. Days when I have a higher resting heart rate tend to come after a couple nights of less-than-stellar sleep. It's easy to guess that being antsy all day is nervous energy from work, but if it only happens after 4 days of 6.5 hours of sleep... the fix isn't to work on my resting heart rate via meditation, it's to get more sleep.<p>The great thing for me is that I have concrete actions that help fix specific biometric anomalies: going to bed earlier, drinking less/more alcohol/coffee, exercising more/less. I know I should do all of these things all the time, but being able to see the effectiveness of specific actions is really satisfying.
I once left my fitbit in the wash (and then dryer) and was wondering why I was suddenly getting all these "congrats on hitting your steps goal!" alerts on my phone.
It's always interesting to see qualitative stuff associated with quantified self; it seems like ultimately the goal is to lead a (happier|better) life, which is a very qualitative notion, but we end up turning as many things as possible into quantitative criteria and looking post hoc for some pattern.<p>Koby's tweet shows what a breakup looks like, and it's tragic, but if you imagined someone retrospectively posting a screenshot of their heart rate readings from the day they met their current partner, we might see a similar pattern of elevated readings as well, wouldn't we? It seems like it would be just as plausible (to me, anyway).<p>I'm not saying that we should find better dimensions to measure (I think we'll always find ambiguous, confusing results absent context), but that whatever we measure should get qualitative context if we want it to really mean anything.
Perhaps if everyone tagged their breakup moments on their fitbits then fitbit could mass-process the preceding few months / weeks to find a common pattern.<p>You show up a few minutes early to the restaurant and your fitbit can just let you know what's about to happen.
Not a Fitbit, but I do have a Microsoft Band, which tracks, among other things, your galvanic skin response. I still haven't found any real use for this data, but I have noted that resistivity definitely plummets in response to stressful events, even if I'm not sweating enough to consciously notice it. I once looked at the daily graph and noticed a dip right when our application started throwing errors while I was on-call :)<p>Again, I don't know what use this is, but physiological data is just fascinating in its own right.
Breakup, as captured by my fitbit aria scale
<a href="http://imgur.com/ePX7o8m" rel="nofollow">http://imgur.com/ePX7o8m</a><p>It gets better and life goes on :)
This is fascinating (and sad), but it makes me wonder, could police use your fitness tracker as a sort of poor-mans polygraph? i.e. interview a subject normally, and then get a warrant (or not get a warrant) to view the online data and correlate them after the fact? Wikipedia mentions "blood pressure, pulse, respiration, and skin conductivity" as parameters for a polygraph [1], and while fitbit only supports 2/4 right now, the goal of fitness tracking is to have all of those. Whether or not polygraphs even work is another question, but being able to do them secretly and without consent is scary none the less.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polygraph" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polygraph</a>
My heart rate data has been similarly interesting. For example, I'm a musician for my church band. You can see the spike when I'm doing the lead vocals on a song I don't know that well.<p>It repeats in each of the three services. :)
This just reminds me on how no one has made the killer app for all these sensors. It's just data, no one has shown me how to make myself better from all this data.
See also <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/new-clues-why-women-get-broken-heart-syndrome-1451932640" rel="nofollow">http://www.wsj.com/articles/new-clues-why-women-get-broken-h...</a> for occasionally fatal and measurable symptoms of psychogenic (or vagus mediated?) heart attack.
Looked like 'got up at noon, haven't been to bed yet' to me.<p>Surprising lack of difference between sleep and waking if the only change was the breakup. Not doubting it, just interesting.
Went back to the UK over the holidays - perhaps drank a little bit too much - my fitbit tracked my resting heart rate over the trip. It drops 10 bpm after I came back to HK.
<a href="https://twitter.com/jamiewildehk/status/689726514959495169" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/jamiewildehk/status/689726514959495169</a>
I recently moved from a one-story apartment to a two-story house. You can't really see it in the number of steps my Fitbit says I took, but the number of flights of stairs I did in a day suddenly went way up.
"Had to break up with boyfriend over lunch, he was just too obsessed with his tech gadgets to give me attention."<p>- Corresponding Facebook Post, Presumably