
Breakup, as captured by my fitbit - iamkoby
https://twitter.com/iamkoby/status/689521611611971588
======
trjordan
Getting a puppy, as captured by my fitbit:
[http://i.imgur.com/j9FTleb.png](http://i.imgur.com/j9FTleb.png)

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.

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.

~~~
lectrick
Welcome to my sleep-apnea life. The CPAP is only partially effective due to
(surprise, surprise) a new allergy to... well, everything airborne, seemingly,
including house dust... and even though Allegra does a decent job, sometimes I
unconsciously take the thing off in my sleep, and proceed to have a much
shittier sleep:
[http://i.imgur.com/f9oHjqQ.png](http://i.imgur.com/f9oHjqQ.png)

~~~
DenisM
Do you have the latest CPAP machine? The latest generation is a dramatic
improvement over the older generations, especially with the exhale relief,
this yields less discomfort and more compliance. I can't recommend it enough.

~~~
lumpypua
Any particular suggestions? I need to go shopping soon.

~~~
DenisM
I swear by my Resmed AutoSet S10. They have too many S10 models, so be sure to
get the AutoSet (or higher), as it dials the pressure up and down. I'm kicking
myself for sticking with an older S8 model for far too long, all the misery I
endured was entirely unnecessary!

Proper pressure is the key to compliance. This machine has auto-set, so the
minimal required pressure is used; it has better algorithms for it (compared
to S8); and it has exhale relief (it drops the pressure when you start
exhaling). It's easier to exhale, thus reducing the overall pressure.

An additional way to reduce the pressure is a neck pillow. I use one with a
silly name of Dr Dakota. Aside from keeping your chin from falling down, it
keeps your neck straight, and so it opens up the airways. It's a big deal if
you have bad posture, like I do. This was a _dramatic_ improvement for me.

Further, reducing the pressure will reduce leaks, and thus reduce pressure
further, as the machine won't need to compensate as much. A virtuous cycle, if
there ever was one.

And lastly, reducing the pressure allowed me to use a nasal pillow mask, which
is very comfy, easy to maintain, and has the lowest leaks of all designs I
have tried. I can't use it at high pressure due to mouth leaks, but I can
handle it at the low pressure, and due to mostly zero leaks now ... the
pressure goes down even more.

Combining all of these, I brought my leaks to zero (like, 90%th percentile),
and AHI to less than one, like 0.6 is in there most of the time. That's only
one event per the 90-minute sleep cycle.

Good luck!

~~~
lumpypua
Thanks for the extensive answer! I did an at-home CPAP trial after a sleep and
they gave me some POS machine and I hated it. Unfortunately getting anything
more fancy is going to require jumping through insurance hoops. _rolleyes_
Pretty new to this whole thing.

My posture definitely makes a big difference, I'm at 9 AHI sleeping on my side
but 50+ on my back untreated. I'm gonna duct tape pillows to myself or
something. Glad you found something that works for you!

~~~
DenisM
Pay cash. You can get a refurb at $600. It's totally worth it.

Speaking side-sleeping, I have sewn a sock with a tennis ball to the back of
my sleeping tshirt. It worked well, but it's hard to wash. So I bought this
contraption:
[https://www.amazon.com/stream/ref=nav_upnav_mobile_T2_Detail...](https://www.amazon.com/stream/ref=nav_upnav_mobile_T2_DetailAW)

Side-sleeping is a big deal, but it's even better with a neck pillow.

~~~
DenisM
Better link, I hope.
[https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00DTLLYQ6/](https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00DTLLYQ6/)

~~~
lectrick
Believe it or not, I also snore on my side. sigh

~~~
DenisM
Of corse. But a better question to ask is if your AHI takes a plunge. If it
goes down from 20 to 10 for example you are halfway there to control your
apnea.

A good CPAP machine will tell you what your AHI is. Even the S8 does, though
you have to get to the system menu (hold down and right arrows for five
seconds).

------
thedz
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.

~~~
myth_buster
Got a badge for climbing 33 stairs + a plethora of others, while in actuality
I was riding my motorcycle.

~~~
CWuestefeld
Mine has never registered a stair climb, despite my office being on the third
story of the building, and I typically park on the 4th or 5th floor of the
garage.

Its sleep stats are also laughable. It's shown me as sleeping right through
the time I was showering and cooking breakfast.

~~~
brlewis
That's not normal. You may have a defective unit.

------
alialkhatib
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.

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).

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.

------
state
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.

You show up a few minutes early to the restaurant and your fitbit can just let
you know what's about to happen.

~~~
ihsw
That sounds like an excellent way to freak people out and preemptively break
up.

~~~
ianamartin
It absolutely could. This past weekend I was really worried about getting
broken up with. My gf had been withdrawn and was communicating less and acting
awkward in various noticeable ways that I interpreted from experience as an
impending breakup, especially since she was just about to leave for a week to
go to Brazil for a week with 3 single girlfriends who want to party.

I was pretty sure that I was toast when she asked if I wanted to get dinner on
Sunday and talk for a little while.

If you had looked at my readings that day, I would have looked like a breaker-
upper, I'm sure.

Turns out that she was stressed about work and travel and after we talked
about it a little, everything was fine. But damn. I really thought that was
over for the better part of three days.

~~~
bostonpete
She probably chickened out at the last minute. Don't worry, she'll work up the
nerve one of these days... ;-)

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Analemma_
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 :)

Again, I don't know what use this is, but physiological data is just
fascinating in its own right.

~~~
viraptor
Isn't that basically what scientology e-meters are? I didn't know they had any
relation to real life events.

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siruva07
Breakup, as captured by my fitbit aria scale
[http://imgur.com/ePX7o8m](http://imgur.com/ePX7o8m)

It gets better and life goes on :)

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funkysquid
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.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polygraph](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polygraph)

~~~
Jtsummers
It'd almost certainly require consent or a warrant to get the data (in the
US). But it would have a problem that polygraphs (presumably) attempt to
handle. You have no baseline questions and timeline. A stressed individual
(being interviewed by the police would be stressful) will look different from
an unstressed individual. Without the control questions at the start, you have
no basis to draw conclusions from.

~~~
JadeNB
> You have no baseline questions and timeline.

I don't think that this will happen, but one can imagine solving this problem
by subpoenaing your past FitBit data and social-media record, and correlating
the two (by time stamp, which, if maybe not now, then I am sure eventually
will be sufficiently fine grained to allow this). I'd imagine that it would be
far more accurate than whatever calibration they do now.

~~~
Jtsummers
Yeah. Protomyth made the point about aggregating biometric data with other
data (shopping, akin to the Target pregnancy notice letter, browsing, etc.).
That could be effective, if the sensors and social media, shopping, other data
were available.

I know everyone (or most people) get hunches about what's going to happen by
observing other people's behavior. Whether it was predicting a break-up,
guessing that someone was pregnant, or in a new relationship. The glut of data
available now would likely reveal a lot if we allowed it to be aggregated.

I guess I shouldn't have thought so narrowly about just biometrics (and heart
rates, in particular).

------
teach
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.

It repeats in each of the three services. :)

~~~
forty
That would be a great ad for this kind of device: the heart rate of <famous
singer> before/during <awesome concert> :)

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anigbrowl
I'm beginning to warm up to the idea of a civilization-destroying EMP.

------
jgh
Hm, I should post "Secondary screening at immigration, as caught by my Apple
Watch"

------
jreed91
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.

~~~
peterwallhead
[https://exist.io](https://exist.io) is attempting to solve this problem (no
interests, just a happy user).

~~~
zimpenfish
Looks neat - will have to see how it compares against
[https://gyrosco.pe/](https://gyrosco.pe/)

------
jasonkostempski
Doesn't say which side of the breakup he was on.

~~~
protomyth
I'm thinking the receiving end. I would expect a sense of relief in the person
doing the breaking and not the lingering effects.

~~~
glibgil
Um, did you see the guy's photo? I'm going to guess no one breaks up with that
guy unless he does the old trick of acting like a jerk until the other person
wants out.

~~~
Jtsummers
Plenty of people that are attractive and good (or at least non-jerks) that get
broken up with. They don't necessarily have to be a jerk, just not a good
match for their partner. Politics, views on marriage, mismatched libido, kids,
etc.

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jjore
See also [http://www.wsj.com/articles/new-clues-why-women-get-
broken-h...](http://www.wsj.com/articles/new-clues-why-women-get-broken-heart-
syndrome-1451932640) for occasionally fatal and measurable symptoms of
psychogenic (or vagus mediated?) heart attack.

------
sago
Looked like 'got up at noon, haven't been to bed yet' to me.

Surprising lack of difference between sleep and waking if the only change was
the breakup. Not doubting it, just interesting.

------
jamiewildehk
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.
[https://twitter.com/jamiewildehk/status/689726514959495169](https://twitter.com/jamiewildehk/status/689726514959495169)

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hellofunk
Would an Apple Watch also capture these interesting moments the same as a
fitbit? I don't have either, but find it quite interesting.

~~~
brandonb
Yes—Apple Watch records your heart rate every 10 minutes during the day, and
every five seconds when you put it in workout mode.

For example, here's what my heart rate looked like during the Game of Thrones
finale:
[https://cardiogr.am/c/gameofthronesfinale](https://cardiogr.am/c/gameofthronesfinale)

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dominsbeard
Something similar happened to me when I lost my laptop. For the hour it took
to retrace my steps and find it my hr spiked.

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madcaptenor
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.

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6stringmerc
"Had to break up with boyfriend over lunch, he was just too obsessed with his
tech gadgets to give me attention."

\- Corresponding Facebook Post, Presumably

~~~
ljk
relevant xkcd - [https://xkcd.com/523/](https://xkcd.com/523/)

