"Soon I was obsessing over my sleep and activity scores. The reports were generally positive except for one: heart rate variability, or HRV. That's a measure of how much the time between heartbeats changes. Every morning, in bright red, my ring's app singled out HRV and told me: Pay attention. That didn't sound good, although I had no idea why. Before wearable fitness watches, rings and bracelets became so common and started including HRV as a data point, I had never heard of it."
"Even among heart doctors, its use has been limited. I don't think HRV is used in day-to-day clinical medical practice, says Bryan Wilner, an electrophysiologist at the Baptist Health Miami Cardiac and Vascular Institute. But it's gained a lot more popularity in regular consumers with these noninvasive monitors. Suddenly, we are all paying attention to HRV. And as reams of data are collected from hundreds of thousands of people like me, the measure has the potential to become a far more significant tool"
A user acquired an Oura ring and became fixated on sleep and activity scores while receiving repeated HRV alerts. HRV measures slight millisecond variations between consecutive heartbeats, captured over minutes, distinct from arrhythmias. Resting heart rate typically ranges 60–100 bpm, but intervals shift with posture, exercise, and stress, which HRV reflects. Cardiologists have limited everyday clinical use of HRV, yet consumer noninvasive monitors have popularized it. Aggregated data from large numbers of users may enhance HRV's role in diagnosis and therapy, but no single HRV threshold defines good or bad and clinical utility remains under development.
Read at www.scientificamerican.com
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