
Your heart rate at gunpoint - sebg
https://medium.com/@aleksandarvuk/your-heart-when-you-think-you-re-going-to-die-154ebed2087a#.j8f25us8w
======
brandonb
I'm glad you're ok! Heart rate data is such a window into our emotional lives.
There was the guy who recorded a breakup on his Fitbit:

[http://www.buzzfeed.com/stephaniemlee/a-mans-fitbit-
captured...](http://www.buzzfeed.com/stephaniemlee/a-mans-fitbit-captured-the-
exact-moment-he-felt-heartbreak)

Even more traumatic, there's what Game of Thrones does to your heart rate:

[https://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/08/13/what-game-of-
thrones...](https://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/08/13/what-game-of-thrones-does-
to-your-heart-rate/)

And there are potentially life-saving applications of heart rate data, like
the collaboration we're building with UCSF cardiology to detect abnormal heart
rhythms:

[https://mRhythmStudy.org](https://mRhythmStudy.org)

Even with "just" 11 million Apple Watches sold, that's about 2,400,000,000,000
heart rate measurements per year. I think that will lead to all sorts of
downstream applications.

~~~
agumonkey
My cardiac system is very sensitive to emotional loss. Grandmothers =
tachycardia. Last break up nearly killed me. I wish I had a fitbit so my
doctors wouldn't look at me like a sad puppy who cannot find a new woman and
is making things up.

~~~
raelshark
I have an autonomic nervous system disorder (postural tachycardia) that causes
my heart rate to skyrocket at any kind of physical or emotional stress.
Basically it's like my fight-or-flight response is broken and over-reacts to
everything (even from seeing blood or just standing up). Serious emotional
issues can triggers panic attacks for me pretty easily.

I went through a battery of heart tests that all turned up normal and I was
diagnosed with anxiety, until years later when someone thought to test my
nervous system. So yeah, I can relate.

But those heart tests even included wearing a monitor that didn't tell them
anything useful other than that it was elevated at times... but not that there
was a real physiological underlying cause beyond simple anxiety. Not sure
they'd put any more interest in a Fitbit's data.

~~~
agumonkey
I don't have your condition but on its worse times my circular system was
about to shut down, my 4 limbs were cut to sustain the rest. For months Any
activity in one part of my body would cause the rest to feel numb. Even typing
with two hands would saturate my brain. The story makes them smile as in "you
wouldn't be speaking anymore if you experienced this". If I had a trace of the
sudden lack of blood pressure they'd at least have something quantitative to
consider rather than borderline incoherent speech. That said most generalist
wouldn't consider it anyway as you said.

~~~
raelshark
That's really interesting - I havent heard of those kinds of problems outside
of autonomic issues. You actually got diagnosed with something else related to
cardio that causes that?

And yeah if it's low blood pressure-related that's hard to show them, since it
changes so much and will be different in the doc's office than normal, and
because there's no real way to do continuous BP monitoring the way you can
with heart rate. Luckily in my case there's a simple test you can do at home
or in a doctor's office to see the BP drop quickly.

~~~
agumonkey
So far not, I have tests booked next week. My 'wikipedia' self diagnosis was
something similar to takotsubo syndrom. Emotional pain -> hormone flush ->
broken heart muscle functions -> BP shut -> vaso-constriction reflex
attempting to restore BP. Few weeks later I had a feeling of 'clogged artery'
on my left side. No pain though, otherwise I'd have gone to a hospital because
it would have seem like an infarctus. Looked like a very bad BP, very bad diet
(sadness->eating shit), fat deposit, occlusion, near infarction. I suspect it
affected my brain too, I lost control of my left side for sophisticated
movements, for months I couldn't type with both hands while reading what I was
typing (had to alternate one word, check, next word). Things are coming back
now but still I'd love to have a full checkup (angiography, brain scan) to
avoid pushing too hard on my system before the time is right, problem is no
doctor will send you for such tests unless you're crashing in front of them.
Takes time. For a year I wished for more non invasive medical monitoring and
tests..

------
source99
This article seems fake to me. The story feels a bit made up and the end reads
like a tag line: "If you want to find out why I had the wearables on me —
check out emozia."

~~~
owenwil
The guy's a CEO of a heart rate company. I don't want to question his
motivations too much, but it's obviously in his favor to publish something
like this...

~~~
ekianjo
Yeah "first post on medium" should actually read "first pr piece".

~~~
ricardobeat
Nothing wrong with that. It's doubly in his interest to publish this piece.

------
wimagguc
What we can't see in the data is another period of slightly elevated heart
rate, when you run away after the baddies are gone.

Seriously: never handle robbery as a simple transaction -- many times the
robbers do realise in their aftermath that they should in fact have killed
you, and you don't want to be still around then. (I've tried to link a good
post here, but it's pretty hard to Google this subject. I'm not an expert, so
handle my comment with caution.)

~~~
gnodar
> many times the robbers do realise in their aftermath that they should in
> fact have killed you

Well I agree that you should get to as safe a location as possible immediately
following a robbery, however I really would like to see the post you had in
mind. Maybe I have a different percentage in mind when I read the word "many",
but I'm highly skeptical that this is a common occurrence amongst robbers.
Granted they tend not to be the best critical thinkers, but why would they
risk adding homicide to the list of charges should they be caught?

~~~
wimagguc
It's surely a small number, but how small would it have to be for you to take
the risk? It's not a rational act to rob someone, so it's a fair assumption
that their next decision won't be solely based on reason or logic either.

Mind you, we don't know the heart rate of the robber.

~~~
heinrich5991
Why can it not be a rational act to rob someone?

------
ghshephard
" They instructed me to unlock my phone and other personal accounts. " \- That
would suck. As one who has also been robbed at gunpoint (Redwood City, CA), I
remember clearly thinking - "Thankfully, all you're getting is a locked
phone."

With touch ID, my password is a 24 character ridiculous combination of special
characters, numbers, and letters (only typed on power up) - so If I ever get
mugged again (highly unlikely now that I'm living in Singapore) - at the very
least, they'll get the iPhone unlocked with my touch ID, and if they ask me to
enter my password - zero chance of them memorizing it without taking a lot of
detailed notes - which, honestly, muggers usually aren't into.

~~~
pdkl95
> instructed me to unlock my phone and other personal accounts.

Given that use this tactic will probably increase over time, phones and other
portable computers should really support duress passwords.

The device should look like it unlocked properly, but really put everything in
a type of read-only mode where writes and certain network transactions return
success but don't actually do anything. Obviously, if network access (any
type) is available, some sort of silent alarm can be raised at the same time.

~~~
tempestn
I was thinking the same thing, but it would be very tricky to do right. If
there's any tip-off, it could literally get someone killed. Plus, what if they
just have you open your phone's browser to log into online banking? Not much
the OS can do about that without making it obvious that the browser is locked
down. You could claim to not use online banking, but would you be willing to
risk your life? Or what about the email app? Making it read-only doesn't help
much; giving a criminal read-only access to all your email would be a
disaster. But again, it would be obvious something was up if the account was
empty.

I'm not saying it couldn't be done, but it would be very difficult to do in a
way that wouldn't be noticed, especially once it became common knowledge.

~~~
chris_overseas
Take a look at Cerberus [1], it has a lot of very helpful features that I
haven't seen on other similar apps. Eg take silent photos on incorrect login
attempts and email them to you, disable power-off, survive factory reset. I
used it once successfully to recover my lost phone. It automatically sent
photos to me of the person who found it, and I made my phone speak out a voice
message asking them to please stay there while I came to collect it. The guy
who found it was looking stunned when I arrived there a few minutes later.

I'm not affiliated with Cerberus in any way, just a happy customer.

[1]
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.lsdroid.ce...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.lsdroid.cerberus)

~~~
MertsA
>disable power-off

If the thieves are somewhat savvy they will just hold down the power button
until it turns off. Can't disable that in software.

------
peterwwillis
Idea for a dystopian tech novel:

A guy who is about to surprise his girlfriend with a wedding proposal gets
arrested because the police, with its newfound data-sink into Apple's tech
stack and wearables, made legal by enhanced fear over domestic terrorism
combined with a lack of public interest in privacy rights, had an illegal-
behavior-trigger set to a similar heart rate spike and circumstantial behavior
pattern. Since he kept his wedding plans to himself, he has no way to prove
his story, and he's imprisoned along with actual potential terrorists who the
feds have entrapped into collecting bomb materials or spying on high value
targets. The girlfriend gets hit in an actual mass shooting soon after (since
they've incrementally risen in frequency to once every few weeks), and the
boyfriend is implicated and later convicted with a death sentence. Twenty
years later, on the eve of his execution, a new law is passed that exonerates
anyone who was convicted based on circumstantial statistical correlations -
but a last minute push to the prison's e-mail and news alert apps introduces a
bug that delays updates for 24 hours.

Now if only I were a writer...

~~~
hga
Gordon Dickson is the first as far as I know to write this, in 1965:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computers_Don%27t_Argue](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computers_Don%27t_Argue)

------
adarsh_thampy
I find the heart rate peak of 164 surprising for a near-death experience. I am
27 and while working out, I typically hit 170-180 at it's peak.

American heart association website says 200 beats per minute is the average
maximum for 20 -30 year old people. I'd assume the heart rate to reach that
maximum during such intense situations.

I'm a marketer. So yes, the plug at the end makes me really suspicious about
the authenticity of the story.

------
throwaway76931
I couldn't identify with this story at all. If this happened to me - and it
has in the past - I wouldn't think about any of that stuff. I'd just want them
to finish me off.

I'm thirty years old, and I feel like if I was shot dead for some pointless
reason like my ancient Moto G phone and whatever pittance of money I had on
me, I'd not feel bad about it at all. I'm not currently working because I've
had some health problems over the past year, getting back into work is an
impossible maze of we'll-call-you-backs, send-us-your-CV-and-we'll-get-back-
to-yous, we'll-keep-you-on-files, jobs with hundreds of applications, waiting
for emails and calls that never come.

I feel like I'm a person too far in this part of the world, like there are too
many people for the resources available and all I'm doing is taking up space,
a sack of meat using up resources and contributing nothing. My dreams are
modest - a minimum wage job and a small, private place to live - and yet they
seem unattainable. Getting myself killed wouldn't bring any regrets for me, I
wouldn't regret that I never got to live out my dreams, because I don't really
have any. Killing me would free up some space for someone more worthwhile to
take my space in the world.

I'm not actually anything - I don't have a role in the world, I'm just trying
to survive and make enough money to live, and I don't even know why I want to
stay alive. I honestly wish this would happen to me.

~~~
madaxe_again
:(

You talk of feeling valueless within the context of industrialised society.

There is a rather huge amount of world beyond the horizon, and many different
ways of living.

As someone who has come face to face with their own mortality in a few ways
(some slow and creeping, some "oh shit I'm about to die"), and has also shared
a similar perspective to yours in the past - there's something about being
faced with the actual prospect of imminent death beyond your control that
adjusts your perspective more than you can fathom.

Either way - chin up, there's a lot more life to work and being "a functioning
member of the economy". If you feel you're at rock bottom, then remember it
can only get better.

~~~
throwaway76931
I nearly died last year as a result of the health problems I was facing, and
my immediate reaction was relief at the thought that I wouldn't have to face
another day in the dead-end Linux sysadmin job I was doing at the time.

My aim, long-term, was always to lead a simple and frugal life rather than to
try and amass as much wealth as possible. A small home, a place to grow food,
a modest income from various bits-and-bobs of work.

But to do that, you need _some_ money to start you out and that's where I'm
failing. I'm out of the running for any professional jobs because of the break
in employment and the competition for entry-level jobs is such that any slight
gap in your employment history means you just get a "we'll call you back".

Having had health issues and a gap in employment history seems to mean I am no
longer a useful or valid member of society. I wish I had died last year, so I
wouldn't be wasting everyone's time and space.

~~~
madaxe_again
I hear you with the health bit - if I weren't self employed I doubt any
employer would have had the patience to sit through several years of erratic
attendance, and it's been hard enough picking myself back up even with work to
go back to, so I empathise with your position - I've been broke and hopeless
before, too - serendipity usually strikes when you expect it least.

Useful doesn't equate to validity - and the fact that you're able to think in
such empathic terms suggests that you are more useful than you might think.

Also, plenty of employers won't look at a gap and rule you out - big,
autocratic miserable places will, but smaller shops usually care more about
humans as people, and you might have more luck.

You based in the uk? What sort of sysadmin/security experience have you got?

~~~
throwaway76931
I've worked mostly for charities and non-profit organisations in the past - I
spent about three-four years working at a charity that provided hosting and
audio streaming services to other organisations to generate income.

It's a pretty standard Linux sysadmin skillset - we were a LAMP CentOS shop
primarily, we virtualised with OpenVZ and subsequently VMWare, nothing too
out-of-the-ordinary, just general solid administration skills.

~~~
madaxe_again
Those sound like totally transferable skills - and if you've experience on the
security side of things, it's worth knowing that the industry is desperate for
anyone who is willing to have "information security" as a core part of their
role.

Chin up though, as glib as it sounds - being dead never solved anything for
anybody, and sometimes it takes finding yourself in a really shitty,
despairing place to see the way forwards. You'll make it, no matter how grim
it looks today.

------
T2000
This puts my fear of public speaking into perspective. My heart rate during a
department meeting where I had to speak for 5 minutes:
[http://imgur.com/x25MDJf](http://imgur.com/x25MDJf) (familiar topic, familiar
crowd)

~~~
akp__
Ugh, just looking at that graph makes me feel anxious.

------
rdl
I'm curious if anyone's done real studies on heartrate and other biosensors
for trained vs. untrained people, and people who could do something vs. not.

I've certainly felt vastly more calm (whether or not I actually did have a
lower heart rate) when I had something to do.

~~~
eob
I was mugged by a gang in Rio and, for a little over a minute, had a knife
shoved against the front of my neck and a gun into my back. For me the
experience was so bizarrely, intensely focused. The world didn't exist outside
gazing into the eyes of the guy holding the knife. We just kept repeating back
and forth to each other "não problemas, não problemas" until they left.

I came away wondering if training would have allowed me to think _at all_. It
sounds like such a low bar, but I seriously don't think a single thought went
through my head the entire time. It was pure experience.

~~~
rdl
For me it was always things I had zero control over (indirect fire, usually at
night, usually single rounds, although terrifyingly close and walking-onto-me
a couple times), which scared me when I thought it was effective and totally
didn't bother me when I thought it was ineffective.

Except a few other times, where my remembered terror was highest in the
incidents where I'd had no real response or control, and really just remember
the action in cases where I did have some level of responsibility/control. But
that might be a failure of memory.

------
bobbles
I'd actually like to know what the process was like _after_ the assault. If
you unlocked your phone and 'other accounts' what'd you have to go through to
sort it out?

Presumably that included a bank acc app on your phone, can you get that cash
back, etc?

~~~
gambiting
I've only had bank apps in the UK(Barclays, Lloyds and Santander) but the app
on the phone only allows you to send money to known recipients, to send money
to a new account you have to log in from a normal browser and use your RSA-
signer([https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ee/Barclays...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ee/Barclays_Pinsentry_5920.jpg))
to authenticate it, and no one I knows keeps theirs on them. So even if I was
forced to open my bank app the worst thing they could do is see my account
balance and send some money to my friends or my landlord.

------
cup
Strange they went through the trouble of armed robbery but didn't bother
checking for watches or jewellery..

~~~
cup
Actually, now that I've noticed the article concludes with a link to emozia im
suspicious of the whole incident.

------
chrisdotcode
I know Vuka (the article's author) in real life. I'll send him a FB message
and see if he would be willing to answer some of the burning questions asked
here.

Will update if I hear back.

~~~
chrisdotcode
He has replied here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11431777](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11431777)

------
Etheryte
Cool coverage, but the graph could be better. Cropping the bottom part of it
makes it harder to put things into perspective relative to one another.

------
hauschi
Crazy world. There is also a thread with a person breaking up with his GF
which provides tons of data. The curve is kind of the same!

------
ryanmarsh
Well, that's one way to cope with a traumatic experience...

------
rplnt
This is out of another world for me. Couldn't imagine living in South America
or whatever third world country this happens in. Oh, wait...

~~~
morgante
There's no country on earth without any muggings.

It's not exactly common in the US though.

~~~
rplnt
There's a difference between mugging with a knife and with a pistol. Not
because knife isn't deadly (it very much is), but because it's much harder
(physically, psychologically and even time-wise) for the perpetrator to
deliver the threat in case anything happens.

------
kzhahou
Post the data!

------
randycupertino
Glad to hear you were okay.

------
googletron
Very cool! Things like this is what we love at
[http://gyrosco.pe](http://gyrosco.pe)

~~~
Bluestrike2
Ah, yes. Every wearables-related startup loves unique sensor data. Muggings
are apparently very unique and interesting. I bet murders would count, too.
You can get a big spike and then a flat line.

~~~
imtringued
Hey, it's free data! Nobody can say no to free data! Or do you hate free
data?!?

