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Fitbit's 150B hours of heart data

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Re: Fitbit's 150B hours of heart data

#111

Post by blub »

sanlyx wrote: post #37
saagarjha wrote: post #4

> 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 mil…

I don't really care about Fitbit collecting all that data. If you don't want yours to be used, just buy another tracker from the tons out there. Privacy is all about choice, so it's not as bad as i.e. Google using your search data because the room for choice is smaller (at least for me, having tried out DuckDuckGo and others and switching back). Also I'd rather have my data harvested for science and medicine than for…

There are no trackers which don't force customers to create an online account and then upload the data. I looked at every possible product last year and the only exception is Apple.

And all the "science and medicine" done by FitBit according to this article has resulted only in confirming things that are already known. I was actually curious what insights they discovered and there are none.

Re: Fitbit's 150B hours of heart data

#113

Post by wil421 »

atmartins wrote: post #83
wil421 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you care so much? No one is forcing people to use FitBit. If you don’t agree with their practices or data collection then don’t use their products.

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.

Re: Fitbit's 150B hours of heart data

#114

Post by brlewis »

blub wrote: post #111
sanlyx wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really care about Fitbit collecting all that data. If you don't want yours to be used, just buy another tracker from the tons out there. Privacy is all about choice, so it's not as bad as i.e. Google using your search data because the room for choice is smaller (at least for me, having tried out DuckDuckGo and others and switching back). Also I'd rather have my data harvested for science and medicine than for…

There are no trackers which don't force customers to create an online account and then upload the data. I looked at every possible product last year and the only exception is Apple. And all the "science and medicine" done by FitBit according to this article has resulted only in confirming things that are already known. I was actually curious what insights they discovered and there are none.

Did you click the "Article Continues" button?

"Fitbit’s data confirms a lot of what cardiologists already know. But because the Fitbit data set is ridiculously huge, it unearthed some surprises, too."

From there the article goes on to list a number of new insights and potential research areas to pursue.

From a screenshot at https://www.cnet.com/how-to/count-steps-with-apple-watch/ the Apple Watch privacy settings let you turn step count and heart rate tracking on and off, but don't let you choose whether or not to upload them.

Re: Fitbit's 150B hours of heart data

#115

Post by mikestew »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #60
Engineering-MD wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> fail to see how my basic health data like HR, weight etc is going to be used against me except for bad marketing practices. I actually looked into this in some (limited) detail, although for a slightly expanded definition of all data a Fitbit (and the near future similar devices) could collect. Heart rate data has been used in legal cases in the past. In an insurance fraud case, heart rate data from a pacemaker was…

And let's not forget what happens when a fitness tracking company has a data leak, someone plots it on a map, and suddenly military bases pop up like sore thumbs...

"Data leak"? Those someones weren't plotting it on a map, they were looking at the Strava web interface, who already did all the hard work.

Re: Fitbit's 150B hours of heart data

#116

Post by mikestew »

kendallpark wrote: post #23

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 I have personally found that average RHR per week tends to correlate strongly w…

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.

Re: Fitbit's 150B hours of heart data

#117

Post by sndean »

lawlessone wrote: post #32

>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?

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

[1] http://gulfmigration.eu/media/pubs/exno/GLMM_EN_2017_03.pdf

Re: Fitbit's 150B hours of heart data

#118

Post by com2kid »

lostlogin wrote: post #22
com2kid wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

> 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.

Re: Fitbit's 150B hours of heart data

#119

Post by TeMPOraL »

mikestew wrote: post #115
TeMPOraL wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And let's not forget what happens when a fitness tracking company has a data leak, someone plots it on a map, and suddenly military bases pop up like sore thumbs...

"Data leak"? Those someones weren't plotting it on a map, they were looking at the Strava web interface, who already did all the hard work.

You're right, I misremembered this story. The reality makes them look even dumber.

Re: Fitbit's 150B hours of heart data

#120

Post by Matthias247 »

wufufufu wrote: post #91

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…

I have a Versa. I have the feeling for casual daily activity or light exercises (hiking, walking around) it's OK. The resting heart rate also seems to be mostly accurate for me.

However for more intensive activities it seem like it can't keep up. I guess either because of sweat, or because of delays during processing. When I went biking with it and going full-out, the heart rate stayed really low for minutes, until it went somewhere in the medium range (still lower than it actually was). When doing something short and intense like burpees, it might even keep displaying the low starting heart rate, even though the actual heart rate is on the highest side. My garmin with chest strap does a way better job for these kind of activities.

However in total I still like the Versa and would buy it again.

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