131–137 of 137 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd love to see more information about blood rheology and actual flow versus extremas of pressure waves.
Wasn't someone working on a step-on scale which (somehow?) looked at blood flow in your feet and tracked this over time? Something like that might be able to detect plaque buildup over time. Not sure how accurate this would be, or how exactly this would work.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let's assume your worst case scenario. Data is sold directly to insurers. Unhealthy people pay more (kinda fair don't you think?). Healthy pay less. Some have additional motivation to get healthier, because "screw the old me, I don't care about that looser... but if I move a little I can pay less now? Tell me more!" Average society healthiness increases. Even worst scenario is great.
> Unhealthy people pay more (kinda fair don't you think?) Depends. You can be unhealthy through no fault of your own (genetics, environment). From social utility POV, insurance is about pooling risk. Taking your scenario to the limit, if insurance company is able to compute an accurate risk factor for everyone and adjust premiums accordingly, then the risk pool evaporates. But then again, maybe health insurance shoul…
Risk is still pooled because payouts come from fees of the people that didn't (and won't) experience costly events themselves.
More information just makes the business more just and less random for insurer.
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 leng…
Not too many people seem to care on the reading end, so I guess that's fine.
As another user (kaustyap) posted further below:
> 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.
Sounds right to me -- it's a marketing ploy.
In an academic or industrial setting, the data might still be useful, but it would have to get re-crunched with many, many more controls, plus sample corrections, cross-validation against other data, etc. -- than what the linked article does.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
From https://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/t/teenagers/fatalityfacts/t... “About 2 of every 3 teenagers killed in crashes in 2016 were males.”
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I care because if companies can collect enough data to recognize patterns, and generalize those findings, it becomes everyone's problem. You don't think health insurance providers are dying to buy this data? Or drug manufacturers? You're being double sold and generalized. For instance maybe insurance rates increase in a region showing a higher percentage of heart palpitations. I live there and now my rates increased…
I don’t use fitness trackers. I also refrain from posting negatively about products I don’t use. Do you have any proof about FitBit selling to insurance companies? Not all companies are selling data to 3rd parties.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Heaven forbid a foreign company knew about my heart rate and age.
And then determined that you actually are 80% more likely to have early stage heart disease based on a big data analysis tool, and then sold that information to an insurance company, which correlated it with other data they have (like strava's activity times) to uniquely identify you, and now wants to raise your premiums by 400% because you have a "increased likelihood of a pre-existing condition".
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 leng…
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…
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???"