Health and Fitness Tracking Goes Mainstream
Self-tracking has moved beyond professional athletes and data geeks.
Self-tracking has moved beyond professional athletes and data geeks.
Since September, Jeanette Cajide has armed herself with an Elite heart-rate variability monitor. And a temperature-controlled mattress pad. And a Levels continuous glucose monitor. And an Oura Ring that also measures heart-rate variability along with resting heart rate, respiratory rate and temperature. “Yeah, I’m a little crazy on the devices,” says Ms. Cajide, director of strategy and operations at consulting firm Clareo.
She’s got good reason. After returning to competitive figure skating four years ago, she won a national championship. Then last September, she broke her leg while landing an Axel jump. Ms. Cajide, who is 44 years old, competes again in eight weeks—against many skaters half her age.
She is trying to override nearly two decades as a “sedentary adult,” working in tech and investment banking. “I’m trying to make up for lost time. It’s me against time,” she says. “The sensors and data allow me to optimize for getting the most mileage out of my body.”
There is no escaping the Quantified Self movement. Measuring biomarkers used to be the preoccupation of extreme athletes and extreme geeks. No more.
“I think the attitude is shifting. The seriousness of the pandemic has made people realize that gosh, isn’t it a good idea to have a sensor,” says Michael Snyder, chairman of the department of genetics at Stanford University’s School of Medicine, whose research, among other studies, indicates data from smart watches—alterations in heart rate, steps and sleep—can be used to detect Covid-19 as early as nine days before symptoms.
Until relatively recently, health-minded people were excited to track their steps and heart rate. Now they can perform their own urine and blood tests, conduct body-fat scans and monitor their emotions. Soon they may be able to monitor their rate of aging to take steps to slow it down. Rings, watches, patches and apps that monitor biomarkers have taken off, buoyed by a pandemic that alerted everyone to “underlying conditions” they might not be aware of.
Fitness and tech companies, already adroit marketers, jumped on the opportunity, intriguing people like Ms. Cajide. They “have created this persona of somebody who’s striving and they’ve done a really good job of it,” says Joe Vennare, co-founder of Fitt Insider, which produces a newsletter and podcast and invests in health, wellness and fitness. Fitness-tech startups raised $2.3 billion in 2020, 30% more than the year before, according to market-intelligence firm CB Insights.
People who track their data are constantly sharing online. One recently tweeted a graph comparing her heart rate: “me walking alone, hauling it: 140 bpm vs. me walking normal with my friend: <110 bpm.” Another boasted that since he began wearing a sleep-tracking device, he has averaged 8.25 hours of uninterrupted sleep a night. Another tweeted eight separate graphs of jagged green and blue lines with an ominous question: “Anyone have heart rate or respiratory rate peaks in the night that is DOUBLE their normal value? I don’t know if this is a medical problem or just the measuring device.”
Self-trackers often fixate on factors that might influence their performance. “It’s interesting to look at these things and learn about yourself. They can help you understand things you couldn’t unearth on your own,” says Chris Bailey, co-founder and chief technology officer of startup NatureQuant and an endurance mountain biker. He’s currently testing the Apollo Neuro, which isn’t a tracker, but is considered another bio-hacking device designed to increase heart-rate variability and optimize performance. Worn on the wrist or ankle, it is designed to reduce stress and recalibrate the nervous system using varying-frequency vibrations that can be programmed to make you more alert in boring meetings, focus better during cognitive or athletic activities and recover more quickly after physical exertion. Mr. Bailey’s early verdict: “It’s a little hard to tell. It helps with focus a little bit, maybe, but it’s certainly not something that 2Xes your performance.”
Individuals react differently to caffeine, pasta, late nights—almost everything. Last year, Whoop added a journal to its sleep-tracking app. In the journal, users can log more than 70 behaviors to see how, over time, they might affect sleep and performance. Activities include taking medication like Advil, drinking wine, reading before bed and having sex. In a podcast introducing the change, Whoop executives said users had frequently requested the sex-tracking feature. For some, sex can raise core body temperature which is counterproductive to sleep, the company explained, so you might want to take that into account the night before a big event.
As for alcohol: Not a good idea, according to Whoop. While many people think alcohol helps them sleep better, it disrupts the repair and recovery that is supposed to happen during slumber. It interferes with physically restorative slow-wave sleep and it “crushes” your mentally restorative REM sleep, Emily Capodilupo, now Whoop’s vice president data science and research, explained in a company podcast. It messes with your heart rate, suppresses recovery and increases the chance of injury.
When Ms. Cajide, the figure skater, heard about sleep tracking, she thought it was silly. “I don’t care what happens at night,’” she recalls thinking. Then she learned the significance of heart-rate variability—not heart rate, which is beats per minute—but the variance in the length of time between heart beats. HRV is a key indicator of how fit, recovered and ready you are to perform, and can be greatly affected by the quality of your sleep. “I went down the rabbit hole,” she says.
Now she wears a continuous glucose monitor—a patch attached to the underside of her arm. Its data displays on her phone, telling her what foods are spiking her glucose and how efficiently she is managing her energy. She programs the temperature of her mattress pad to gradually fall to 62 degrees in the middle of the night, to bring down core body temperature and thus positively influence her heart rate and HRV. So far it has gotten those metrics to their “best points mid-sleep ever,” she says.
She uses her Fitbit as an alarm clock because its vibration doesn’t spike her heart rate and scramble her metrics. Then she checks the data from her Oura Ring and compares it to that of her Elite HRV, “to make sure they’re giving me the same information.”
The information tells her how hard to train—whether she will attempt an Axel, the jump that resulted in her broken leg last fall. Her current program includes two. “On a good recovery day, I’m more comfortable taking risks,” she says. That is crucial because she has only recently recovered but competes again in just eight weeks.
Dr. Snyder at Stanford understands the obsessiveness. He wears four smart watches, two on each wrist, to figure out what variables are the best to measure and “also sometimes one will run out of batteries.” He believes Ms. Cajide’s kind of self-tracking is critical to the future of healthcare, saying, “If people really care about their own health, they are going to have to take charge.”
Reprinted by permission of The Wall Street Journal, Copyright 2021 Dow Jones & Company. Inc. All Rights Reserved Worldwide. Original date of publication: April 12, 2021
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Audible alerts at the gate call out travellers trying to board earlier than they should
TUCSON, Ariz.—Passengers in Boarding Group 1 were filing onto American Airlines Flight 2721 to Dallas Friday when an ominous sound went off at Gate B11: dip-dip-dip-DOOP. The gate agent delivered the bad news. The passenger was in Group 4. She asked him to wait his turn.
The same sound—the last-gasp sound from AirPods running out of juice, or sad “Game Over” music for an old videogame—went off minutes later. Dip-dip-dip-DOOP.
“You’ll be boarding with Group 5, sir,” the agent said. Five more passengers were turned back before Group 2 was called.
American Airlines is cracking down on line jumpers. All major U.S. airlines do their best to maintain boarding order since priority boarding is a perk for frequent fliers , credit-card holders and big spenders, and is often available for purchase. But American is the first to develop an automated system that instantly flags offenders.
The airline is experimenting at gates in Tucson, Albuquerque, N.M., and Washington, D.C., as part of a broader upgrade to American’s boarding technology. The airline has tested the alerts on more than 4,500 flights this month and will expand to several more cities this year, with an eye to taking it systemwide if no major issues, such as slower boarding, arise at larger airports. The airline says early feedback from fliers and gate agents has been encouraging.
The idea for automated policing grew out of complaints from travellers fed up with line jumpers and the employees who feel their wrath. In particular, top-tier frequent fliers gripe about too many passengers in the first boarding group, says Preston Peterson, American’s managing director of customer experience.
Group 1 is reserved for travellers in first class, certain business-class tickets and American’s executive platinum status. Active duty military members with military I.D. are also allowed. Groups 2 and 3 are similarly elite.
“They’ve earned that [priority] boarding group and they want access to it,” Peterson says.
The biggest perks, of course: plenty of overhead bin space and no worries about the dreaded threat of gate-checking your bag.
The new system promises smoother boarding for passengers and gate agents. I flew to Tucson International Airport to try it out. I put the airline’s traditional boarding to the test at my departure gate in Phoenix. Could I slither into an earlier boarding group? I was in Group 4 but breezed right through with Group 2.
Gate agents tell me it’s hard to monitor passengers’ group numbers manually, big plane or small, especially with boarding-pass readers where travellers plunk their phones face down.
American isn’t telling passengers about the test before their flights, and that’s on purpose. It doesn’t want them to change their behaviour simply because they’re being watched.
Chad Vossen, a 46-year-old chief creative officer for a video-marketing company in Virginia, knew nothing of the test until he and a colleague tried to board in Group 6 instead of Group 8 for a flight to Phoenix. They had done it on other American flights and others, in hopes of avoiding gate-checking their camera equipment.
His first thought when the dip-dip-dip-DOOP went off: “Wow, that doesn’t sound good.”
Vossen says it triggered the sounds losers hear on “Hollywood Squares” or “ The Price is Right .” (American says the sound effects are generic videogame clips and is still testing different sounds.)
He stepped out of line and laughed about getting caught. Vossen says he sees the change mainly as a way to get travellers to pay up for priority boarding. He’s unlikely to pay, but says he will probably finally sign up for American’s loyalty program. Members get complimentary Group 6 boarding regardless of status. That’s one group ahead of regular Main Cabin customers without status.
Peterson, the American customer-experience executive, believes most passengers aren’t out to game the system.
“I think most people just see a line and go, ‘Oh, we’re boarding,’” he says.
About one in 10 passengers on American’s test flights have boarded out of order, the airline says. Not all want to cheat the system. Some are travel companions of those with better boarding positions. American’s policy allows them to board together if they’re on the same reservation but didn’t assign the same boarding group. (The alert still goes off, but the agent can easily override it.) And the airline says its system doesn’t flag pre-boarders, like those with wheelchairs.
Exceptions excluded, I counted as many as seven passengers on one flight boarding in the wrong group; on another, it was zero. That math no doubt changes at a busy hub like Chicago or Dallas. So does the potential for tension.
The passengers I saw seemed to take the ejection in stride, moving aside and waiting for their group. One even apologised to the gate agent.
The test is already having an impact beyond the walk of shame. Peterson says the airline has noticed some passengers jumping out of line after seeing fellow fliers turned away. He says he witnessed the same thing at a non-U.S. airline that began policing boarding groups.
Peterson’s ultimate goal: zero boarding group alerts. “I don’t want anyone to be dinged,” he says.
For now, passengers should expect a cacophony at American gates employing the new tech. Not all alerts will send you to the back of the line. Hear a slot-machine-like sound when you scan your boarding pass? You’re probably seated in an exit row.
Even if you get the dreaded you’re-in-the wrong-boarding-group alert, it could be a mistake. A passenger in Group 8 was taken aback Friday afternoon when it sounded on her flight to Phoenix.
“That did not sound good at all,” she said to the flight attendant.
“You failed at ‘Pac-Man,’” the agent joked.
She was in the right place. The agent hadn’t yet flipped the switch in the app to her group.
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