Wanted to share this story to the community.
This is a story about how one of the functions in a Fitbit helped making important changes to my life.
Now before I start the story, it's worthy to mention the Fitbit in this story is the Charge 3.
It all started 4 years ago - 2016. I was at work and were setting up a projector, cables etc. for a conference we had that day - I'm responsible for all IT at my work. I was just about to sit down after making sure it all worked as supposed, that was the last thing I remembered before waking up in an ambulance.
I were told that I had experienced an epileptic seizure with heavy convulsions, so off to the hospital where they kept me under observation for the following days - no new seizure, so they ended up with discharging me.
In the following week I had all the tests done to check if they could trigger a seizure - nothing happened, so the conclusion was, it was one of those seizures that could happen for anyone.
We fast forward to a 1 year ago - 2019. Once again at my workplace it happened again, another seizure with heavy convulsions and this time the result was clear, I was epileptic. Again all the tests were done, nothing again, but since this was my second time, the reason was clear.
I started up as anyone do with medication and slowly increased dose to prevent side effects. No new seizures happened so I kept taking the agreed dose and have follow-up checks at the hospital.
Once again we fast forward, to January 2020, I began to have sleeping issues. It was interesting to follow the "time spent in each stage of sleep" on the app.
As I had a quite old pillow, that no longer really supported my neck, I decided to get a new one after testing out various ones. My sleeping habit become better, for a time before it again started to be worse again.
We fast forward to present day - April. I got a call from my doctor from the hospital that I had an appointment with, no meeting up as non essentail appointments were cancelled due to the covid-19 virus, so it was changed to a telephone appointment instead.
Now the day before, I once again had a quite troublesome night, woke up with a splitting headache also. After checking how badly I slept in my app, I looked at another function a bit further down - "Estimated oxygen variation" which mention that it normally fluctates, but high variations can be linked to breathing issues. It had a huge spike, far into the high limit which clearly showed an issue with my breathing.
Hmm I was thinking for myself, I decided then to look at past nights to see if it had happened before. After looking through the data, it clearly showed issues back to January where the sleeping trouble started. I mentioned this to my doctor along with other details and it was clear that while sleeping I were having a seizure, every 2 or 3 nights. I were never aware of these seizures, none of the side effect a seizure often can have were present. So of course I started on an increase dose to help getting through the nights. Going strong so far.
So the morale of this story, how a simple function helped me before it could evolve to something far worse if it went unchecked.
Never underestimate how technology can help us in so many ways.
Hope you enjoyed reading through this story from the real life.
Fitbit Product Experts Alumni are retired members of the Fitbit Product Expert Program. Learn more
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