
Fitbit's 150B hours of heart data - napolux
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/exclusive-fitbits-150-billion-hours-heart-data-reveals-secrets-human-health-133124215.html
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wufufufu
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
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
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???"

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lawlessone
>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?

~~~
sndean
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)

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mscasts
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.

~~~
executesorder66
> health data like HR, weight etc is going to be used against me except for
> bad marketing practices

You could pay more for health and life insurance.

~~~
todd8
One problem facing insurance companies is the asymmetric information between
buyer and seller. Should we be able to keep our age secret when buying life
insurance? How about sex or weight?

My teenage son is in all likelihood a less safe driver than the average
teenage woman, should a woman pay the same for her insurance as the generally
more reckless man?

With regard to our health information, should we be keeping information from
our insurance companies? Would it be right to lie about it? If not then should
we hiding it. It seems that in this case we are taking advantage of others
that will inevitable have to pay higher premiums to cover costs of those that
are less honest about their health.

I bought a house recently. The owner didn’t disclose a crack in the slab. They
had covered it with a recent floor covering that fooled both me and the
inspector. Is that okay? Isn’t this similar to trying to keep a life insuance
company from realizing that one has a significant risk say of a heart attack?

I don’t like companies collecting data on me, so if Fitbit does this I would
hope that there was a way to opt out; nevertheless, I feel that we shouldn’t
expect private insurance companies to charge us all the same. This leaves many
people in circumstances where insuance would be unobtainable—a big problem
where government could play an important role in a just solution.

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executesorder66
> should a woman pay the same for her insurance as the generally more reckless
> man

Already sexist. Why not say "should a woman pay the same for her insurance as
a man"?

If you are going to be sexist and agist for the sake of calculating insurance
risk factors, you might as well be racist too.

~~~
todd8
From
[https://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/t/teenagers/fatalityfacts/t...](https://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/t/teenagers/fatalityfacts/teenagers)

“About 2 of every 3 teenagers killed in crashes in 2016 were males.”

~~~
executesorder66
I'm not disputing any statistics. I'm saying, if it's okay to discriminate
based on age and gender (because of stats) then why is it not okay to do the
exact same thing with race?

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wjnc
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.

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Tharkun
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
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
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.

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themmes
> 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.

~~~
Digit-Al
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.

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kendallpark
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).

~~~
mikestew
_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.

~~~
kendallpark
That's super interesting. I wonder why that is.

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mikestew
Dunno. It’s why I always thought RHR was kind of fixed, and if it varied then
you’re measuring me wrng (differing times of day and the like).

As for the affect of exercise, one of the better bike racers I’ve known said
his resting rate was never below 60. Young guy, too.

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kaustyap
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.

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finnjohnsen2
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.

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koliber
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 :).

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techstrategist
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
Amazfit Bip. Does pretty much everything an Apple Watch does for a fourth of
the price.

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wmblaettler
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.

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faitswulff
> 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.

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

~~~
sulam
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
Thank you! <3

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rawoke083600
Now if only it were accurate...

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Bishonen88
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
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.

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lostlogin
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.

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com2kid
> 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.

~~~
lostlogin
Optical, electrical (from chest or skull) and even a BP cuff (pneumatic) were
used. It’s a hard problem.

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

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saagarjha
> 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.

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daniel_iversen
This large scale data analytics is probable the best (or at least usually
fastest) way to solve the worlds big health challenges I would guess. Nobody
forced anyone to wear a smart watch or health tracker. I for one thinks the
world is slightly better off because of companies like Fitbit!

~~~
TeMPOraL
If used by researchers, for research. Not sitting in vaults of private
companies, doing God knows what. I don't even know what they need that data
for.

Sure, now that's there, it could be useful. But why can't we ever go about
collecting such data the right way? Opt-in, and for the right purpose?

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asdkhadsj
> If used by researchers, for research.

Sure, but that's application. Great things usually can do terrible things
depending on application.

At some point we have to take a leap of faith and acknowledge that some
things, like heart data ingestion, is an amazing advancement for humanity.
Lets not try and stop it, lets try to move it in the right direction. Ie, not
private, etc.

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TeMPOraL
I can imagine potential good uses. I just don't trust this particular actor.

