Basis Sciences Wrist Heart Rate Monitor: Insight about your heart

I just started using the Basis wrist HRM www.mybasis.com, a device I have been wanting for decades for! All of us who are trying to understand just what is going on with our hearts and how it affects angina, shortness of breath, and overall performance makes this a truly insightful and useful necessity. As a 2x (heart attack, bypass patient, and pacemaker) user this is really useful.

Basis simply samples heart rate and records it 24x7 along with steps, skin temperature, perspiration, and a caloric output plus sleep. The Basis software on the PC is just great and generates a number of interactive reports or displays where you can look for insight. Unlike the various strap based monitors with wrist connections via ant or BT, combined with their flaky software, ability for data ingestion, etc. Basis just works!

If you really need incite, this is a great device to supplement my BodyMedia...now all I want is to have their two data silos combined... but that's another story and probably another decade. BTW: the two devices tend to agree on calories, unlike the plethora of wrist pedometers who try but just don't have enogh data to be as accurate. 

For example, here's a Daily Summary…

 

August 21 Full day of calorie output and heart rate vs time.

Interepreting a piece of a day

Went to a meeting at 10am  stopping for a croissant, waited for warming it, and then high HR as I ate (a no-no) and walked at about 10:15. Lawyer’s office 10:30 -11:45, then to lunch arriving just before 12. Note two HR spikes in meeting—a couple of disagreements.  Interestingly,  meeting was quite calm compared to the meetings I used to have every day at Digital when I ran R&D in 1972-1983--before I had a heart attack  in Feb 1983. I can only imagine what was going on heartwise!

Patterns is a way to compare HR or other activity parameter across days.

 

The pacemaker reports I get semi-annually that records every heart beat and dumps it into rate buckets for a distribution are intersting on a long term basis and may predict stufff e.g. EoL.  However, no one or no computer looks at them other than to eyeball whether you are totally sedentary. Just giving the avg BPM over 6 months is useful (I think).

Quantitative Self (QS) Silicon Valley meetup video, Gordon Bell, August 2010

From the Quantitative Self Meeting Notes 13 August, 2010.

"At the Bay Area QS Show&Tell meetup, Gordon Bell, legendary lifelogger at Microsoft and co-author of Total Recall gave a candid, engaging talk on his MyLifeBits project. He showed pictures from his SenseCam that takes a picture every 20 seconds while he's wearing it. He generates 1 GB of data per month, including a screenshot of every website he visits and the hundreds of pages of health records from his multiple bypass surgeries. Gordon considers his data to be a surrogate memory - he doesn't look at it unless he needs to remember something specific, and he enjoys making films from the pictures. Resources that he mentioned using include an Oregon Scientific pedometer and the Canyon Ranch preventive health resort in Lenox, Massachusetts. 

Watch the controversy below that emerged when Gordon speculated that if he had been wearing his heart monitor strap while bicycling, he could have prevented his last heart attack - a cardiologist in the audience disagreed that the tracking could have saved him."

http://www.kk.org/quantifiedself/2010/09/gordon-bell-on-mylifebits.php

Zeo: A Personal Sleep Coach

Zeo is a product to capture a person's sleep characteristics as measured by depth e.g. light to deep, REM sleep times by wearing a sensor headband that transmits one's sleep state to a nearby bedside monitor. The bedside unit capture data over a long time period and is the basis for a "Seven Step SleepFitnessProgram" to improve the quality of sleep.   The Zeo Bedside Display "uses algorithms and artificial intelligence software programs to track electrical activity in the brain to determine your sleep phases throughout the night. This includes length and depth of your sleep, awakenings, and a measure of a single night of sleep, called ZQ, which Zeo has created to help educate you about your Sleep Fitness."  Zeo's optional "Smart Wake(TM)" can also wake you at the "best" time. 

For anyone usingf pedometers, exercise heart rate monitors, or any other health fitness devices including BodyBugg, this product looks to provide significant health benefit!  In terms of recording your entire life knowing something about your sleep says a lot about the rest of your life.