Health Predictions & Advice Based on Data and Predicting Illness

[oBoy]

Imagine, if you will, waking up in the morning and syncing your fitbit to your smart phone. Your sleep dashboard tells you that you might want to try getting to bed early tomorrow because you missed your sleep goal by an hour.

Then you log your breakfast -- a giant egg McMuffin breakfast sandwich -- and your Calorie dashboard tells you that you might wanna lay off the calories for lunch so you can have a substantial dinner without surpassing your calorie goal.

You go on your usual morning run, and your heartrate tile tells you that your average heart rate was 5 beats lower than last time -- keep it up. And blah blah blah, so on, so forth until you go to bed.

The next morning, you have a "morning briefing" that tells you what your overall stats -- and suggestions to improve, health warnings, and things to watch -- from the day before were.

Basically, artificially intelligent algorithms that explain to you what your data mean instead of leaving it to the FitBit user to draw conclusions himself.

Moderator's edit: Labels

[sidran32]

I will occasionally get minor heart arrhythmias (irregular heartbeats) due to a condition I have. Since the heart monitor in the Fitbit Surge apparently can detect when the heart muscle contracts, could it be programmed to detect when the heart isn't beating at a normal rhythm? Not necessarily for diagnostic purposes, of course, but perhaps it could indicate an abnormal heartbeat detected with a vibrating alert and quick notification flashed on the screen?

Things like this are good to be aware of if you're exercising, but also for those who know they have this tendency and would like some heads up when it happens.

[Benjiman]

could an alarm be setup to email a contact if heart arrhythmia is detected with gps data

[TrungPh]

 I would love to see this ! Please make it ASAP!

[FerdinandFitbit]

Hi there @sidran32. Thank you for sharing your ideas with us!

I think this would be a very helpful feature for people with heart conditions or even to prevent the development of any. I will go ahead and forward your request to our team to be taken into consideration.

Thank you for stopping by the Feature Request board.

[KennD]

I had a Fitbit over a year ago, it last less than 9 months-kudos to Fitbit for giving a full refund. but because of the short life of the device I am reluctant to buy another.  If Fitbit could come up with a irregular heart beat notification I would be inclined to purchase a product again...

[Thatkaili]

My mother has atrial fibrillation and cannot find her own pulse after many people trying to teach her. We got her the Charge HR and it has been a huge reassurance for her, but she doesn't feel any difference when she has an episode, so she ends up checking her Charge throughout the day. It would be very helpful to have an alert when heart rate exceeds a set limit, it would provide a ton of peace of mind.

[Rbrockport]

@oBoy That is definitely something that would be beneficial... Love all those ideas. 

[lisahomm]

I am suffering from Heart-Arythmies from time to time. It would be great, if a fitbit-device could monitor realtime my heartbeat and give alarm, when an arythmie happens. This would be very important, when I do my sports, so that I can take my medicine in time to prevent bigger problems.

[EmilyEL]

@Thatkaili @lisahomm I went ahead and merged your requests here, as they were along the same lines as this older Feature Request for arrhythmia detection by Fitbit trackers equipped with HR functionality. Go ahead and give it a vote if you'd like to see this idea considered.

[EmilyEL]

Please keep in mind that Fitbit trackers are not medical devices. Thanks for your suggestions and feedback regarding the addition of an alarm when the user's HR hits a designated high or low-point. Keep voting for this idea if you'd like to see it considered!

[ChelseaWagner]

This is a great idea.  I have an  arrhythmia and it would seem that it is not that hard for the unit to track timming between beats.  It tracks the beats anyway.  So how hard would it be to simply track that and record the times.  Just some software is all.  A nice addtiional feature that would make the devise more desirible to a broader market.

[DerrickS]

It seems this feature request may was erroneously declined, and as a result, I've reopened this feature request. Apologies for the mixup.

[SolangeE]

Hey! I think your idea is really great! This will help for more motivation, so you can see your areas of opportunity for the next day! Thanks for sharing your idea, I hope to see it implemented in the next update. 😉

[jeepzilla]

I have a-fib.   It comes and goes.  At the cardiologist for ECG, pulse rate showed 98 on 9 lead ECG and the tracing showed a-fib state..   My fitbit Charge 2 showed 58 simultaneously.  Does the Fitbit count ventricular contractions or atrial contractions?

[Moktek]

As mentioned before, it should not be hard at all for these devices to record the heart beats and if they are irregular to save 60 seconds of the upcoming data, should be just a software change.  I am presently looking into this because I occassionaly have irregular heart beats, there seems to be no arm device on the market that covers this area.  The devices that do are at least as big as a smart phone and cost just as much as one of the arm devices.

[Danie10]

I got chronically ill last week and was admitted to hospital with a high fever. I had been wearing my Fitbit Blaze throughout (it ran for over 6 days - just when I needed it to!). It gave me the opportunity to closely examine the stats it showed as the illness came on. I posted various screenshots with comments at https://www.flickr.com/photos/dvdmerwe/albums/72157681922055386.

In summary, I could see the resting heart rate rising a few hours before the illness struck. This led me to think though why can't Fitbit (and others) not crowdsource more data like this and identify patterns for types of illness (or make it available to researchers). The activity level and heart rate are probably key, but in future perspiration and temperature would provide even more valuable data.

But to make it accurate the "illness data" needs to be flagged. One way is to have an activity called "illness" that we can manually add as an activity with a comment identifying the type of illness such as flu, fever, heart attack, etc.

[honglong1976]

This can be done (kind of) already via a study.

Sign in to https://www.health-eheartstudy.org/

Link your Fitbit account and it pulls the heart rate data from fitbit.

[SunsetRunner]

Fitbit should add a feature where you can add an emergency contact number to automatically send a text to a designated number when the heart rate drops below or rises above a certain number. This could be customized by each fitbit user to best fit the user. This could help people with certain diagnoses, such as seizures. This could be a life saving feature.

[Danie10]

Another idea is to alert the user if the resting heart rate rises over consecutive days by more than X%.

[kkm757]

Pretty straightforward. Google the news stories of AppleWatch users and cardiogram detecting early diabetes and irregular heartbeats. Would be perfect for Fitbit given user base and existing data and heart beat monitoring capabilities

[LanuzaFitbit]

Nice suggestion, thanks for sharing. We look forward to hearing what other community members think.

[ecology.girl.16]

I would love to have a more in depth heart rate monitoring system, especially one that tracks the pattern of heart beats. I have premature ventricular contractions, a type of arrhythmia, that I would like to be able to monitor on my own with my Charge HR rather than having to buy an expensive heart rate monitor that was made for that purpose. 

[Danie10]

I see Garmin monitoring stress by checking fluctuations of heart rate and Apple giving warnings about hear rates not falling fast enough after exercising, and even waking a wearer up at night with a warning about a heart problem. Fitbit needs to move into this proactive area or face losing users moving to other platforms.

[ecology.girl.16]

I have a type of irregular heartbeat called premature ventricular contractions. I would love to be able to use my Fitbit Charge 2 to monitor when I'm having an episode, especially since I know it is already taking a steady stream of heart beat information. All I want is to be able to monitor the intervals between heartbeats, since my PVC is often a skipped beat or irregular rhythm. The data are already there, please share them with your customers Fitbit! Otherwise I'm moving to Apple watch, which I don't wanna do.