I'd like to see a "Check Health" light that changes color when it detects a change in your usual stats. Green when ok. Orange, yellow and finally red when sick.

JeffG 6 days ago

It would operate like a car's "Check Engine" light. if things are normal then it is green. If it notices a change in long term data like HRV, dropping, RHR increasing, Breathing rate increasing, PO2 dropping etc, it would change color depending upon the seriousness.

Tap the screen and it would display the errors or warning it detected. For example:

Helth Check light turns Red. Tap it and it displays: Warning - 5 Areas out of Normal range.

Another click and it shows:

HRV dropping ; RHR dropping;; Breathing rate dropping; VO2Max dropping, etc:

flocsy🤠 6 days ago

I don't know if this is possible with the hardware we have today. If you look at all those graphs you mentioned, you'll see that the do those "drops" once in a while. Sometimes you really are sick, but in most cases you aren't. False positives would drive people crazy. Just look at how much Garmin struggles with nap/sleep detection.

That said, it is possible that we'll see more and more of these ideas implemented gradually in the common years. I participated in a research that was made in a local university and I think Garmin also participated in it as we got Garmin fitness bands to wear. This was during the COVID-19 pandemic. The researchers updated us on the findings and it sounds to me that they were positive. So much so, they continued with the research and extended it to regular flu.

However the participants also had to fill a short form at least twice a week. It took about 2 minutes and an app reminded us to fill it. I don't know how essential this kind of input is for detecting the health issues. Part of the questions were about how we feel, whether you have fever, etc, and some were about tests (whether we made a COVID test, if yes what type and what were the results) The research was anonym and the researchers only got the data with a 1 month delay, so everything was done after the facts, but they claim that they could usually detect that a participant got sick some time (sorry I don't remember how many hours or days) before the participants "knew" it by a test.

JeffG 5 days ago in reply to flocsy🤠

I recently had pneumonia and I'm still recovering My numbers were changing for about 10 days before I went to the doctor and was diagnosed. Would I have done something about it sooner if my trusty Forerunner told me I looked sick? Maybe.

I wouldn't mind false positives. I would like the watch to flag trends, like 4 or 5 day 5 averages, that are out of my usual band. It would prod me to "look under the hood." I can always ignore it. (Like I ignored the sputum every time I ran - before I knew I was sick.).