Fitbit shows how a break-up affected man’s heart rate
Turns out his heart responded to the traumatic event by spiking up to nearly 118 beats per minute. His resting heart rate that morning was 72 beats per minute, where lower resting heart rates usually imply greater cardiac efficiency.
Soto was able to track his spiked heart rate through his Fitbit Charge HR, which he has worn regularly for five months.
As the chart shows, his heart rate stayed elevated for most of the day after he was broken up with, only slowing down at night time.
After Soto posted on Twitter, the chart began to go viral.
“Everyone understands heartbreak, right? Everyone’s felt it. When you have this, it’s interesting — you have something to show,” Soto told Buzzfeed.
Of course, Soto’s experience is not medically validated. In fact, a recent lawsuit against Fitbit claimed that its claims to track heart rate accurately are wildly and in some cases dangerously misleading.
In response, Fitbit said that while its trackers provide better heart rate data than measures such as gym equipment, they are not medical grade.
The company said: “Fitbit trackers are designed to provide meaningful data to our users to help them reach their health and fitness goals, and are not intended to be scientific or medical devices.”
Despite fitness trackers still being rudimentary in some respects, they have been unexpectedly useful as health predictors.
In an interview with the Telegraph in November, Apple CEO Tim Cook pointed out that heart monitoring throguh devices like the Apple Watch can save lives
“One kid in particular, he is a football player, a senior in high school. He learnt from his watch that his heart (rate) was elevated. He mentioned it to his trainer who became very worried about it. Sent him to the doctor and the doctor told him he would have died the following day had he not come in. Basically his organs were shutting down,” Cook said.
“I think there’s an unknown great value in the monitoring of the heart. The idea that you can do it on here and it is automatically checking every 10 minutes or so, it gives you quite a record that you didn’t have.
I think it can be pretty profound, and obviously we will keep honing that over time.”
Source link: http://www.independent.ie/business/technology/fitbit-shows-how-a-breakup-affected-mans-heart-rate-34381633.html
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