Fitbit's 150B hours of heart data • Hacker News Board

Re: Fitbit's 150B hours of heart data

#121

Post by lostlogin » Wed, Sep 05, 2018, 7:41 PM UTC

com2kid wrote: post #118

lostlogin wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Re: Fitbit's 150B hours of heart data

#122

Post by justaguyhere » Wed, Sep 05, 2018, 8:24 PM UTC

sulam wrote: post #68

justaguyhere wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just one data point, but still... Yesterday, my fitbit shows me I had walked 800 steps - I wasn't wearing it and it was just lying there on my desk. Bought it last Christmas, so it is not even a year old. I didn't even bother testing the heart rate data

That’s really odd. I can’t talk about accuracy, but getting steps while it’s literally sitting on a desk would be novel in my experience. Do you have mobile track enabled (the feature where we can use the phone’s accelerometer to try and record steps)? You should also try reaching out to customer support, we invest very heavily in being able to debug it when things go weird.

I am not sure if mobile track is enabled, but it shouldn't matter because my phone wasn't moving either. Both were on the desk, till evening. After work (I work from home and I only use the watch when I step out), I stepped out and was surprised to see it was showing ~800 steps. It was a bit amusing!

Re: Fitbit's 150B hours of heart data

#123

Post by blub » Wed, Sep 05, 2018, 8:26 PM UTC

brlewis wrote: post #114

blub wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I did, none of the "surprising things" seem like they could result in any medically actionable info. They're more like medical curiosities, while the truly actionable info was already known.

iCloud sync can be turned off completely on any iPhone. Anyway, I believe the health data is encrypted with some device-specific secret, but I'm not 100% sure.

Re: Fitbit's 150B hours of heart data

#124

Post by amaccuish » Wed, Sep 05, 2018, 8:39 PM UTC

sulam wrote: post #64

amaccuish wrote: post #16

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

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.

Thank you! <3

Re: Fitbit's 150B hours of heart data

#125

Post by Tharkun » Wed, Sep 05, 2018, 8:59 PM UTC

agumonkey wrote: post #75

Tharkun wrote: post #2

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. Mayb…

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.

Re: Fitbit's 150B hours of heart data

#126

Post by todd8 » Wed, Sep 05, 2018, 9:20 PM UTC

executesorder66 wrote: post #103

todd8 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 in…

> 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.”

Re: Fitbit's 150B hours of heart data

#127

Post by kendallpark » Wed, Sep 05, 2018, 11:30 PM UTC

mikestew wrote: post #116

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.

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

Re: Fitbit's 150B hours of heart data

#128

Post by mikestew » Thu, Sep 06, 2018, 12:12 AM UTC

kendallpark wrote: post #127

mikestew wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

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.

Re: Fitbit's 150B hours of heart data

#129

Post by scotty79 » Thu, Sep 06, 2018, 12:14 AM UTC

chadmeister wrote: post #87

scotty79 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no medical R&D comapny that could run a test that fitbit runs as a sideshow to their business. So either fitbit gathers this data or noone does. What will it do with the data? I hope it will anonimise it reasonably and puts it up on the internet for free but that's a bit unrealistic. I think it will pass the data to researchers, similar way other companies did in the past. That's beneficial in my book and I…

Or you know, they pass it on to your insurer who can trivially deanonamize it...

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.

Re: Fitbit's 150B hours of heart data

#130

Post by TeMPOraL » Thu, Sep 06, 2018, 7:40 AM UTC

scotty79 wrote: post #129

chadmeister wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or you know, they pass it on to your insurer who can trivially deanonamize it...

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 shouldn't really be a private industry.