I was wondering how the calculation of a value for "Stress" is performed. There is no galvonic skin response being measured. Only heart rate and movement. Just curious!
Certainly the Firstbeat measure hits the mark of plausibility for me - it seems to categorise my days correctly!
A lot of the feedback we've been getting is along the lines of "weirdly accurate" or "strangely knows how I'm doing." Which is great. I think there's a lot of skepticism out there - and for good reason - because there's a whiff of mood ring to the promise of stress tracking. Also, most people tend to think of stress as an emotional state rather than a physiological state, which it is... with a strong emotional dimension, of course.
I had my own Garmin stress tracking success story a few weeks ago when our family moved to a different part of the city.
About 3-days into the actual move, my wife woke up and said she was feeling exhausted even though she'd gotten a full 8 hours of sleep. She showed me the sleep graph in Garmin Connect (vívosmart 3, in case anyone was wondering) to confirm her point. In fact, she'd gotten a full 8 hours of sleep for a number of consecutive nights - but still felt tired. I asked what her stress chart looked like.
She pulled it up, and then stared at it, very surprised.
Days prior to the move were very nicely balanced with lots of those blue resting marks. Exactly coinciding with the start of the move, the blue resting marks disappeared from the chart and it was stress, stress, stress all over the place. Perfect example of how real-world activities (our move) can produce stress that doesn't allow your body to recovery properly even to the point of interfering with the restorative quality of your sleep.
Heart rate variability. There's a huge difference between tracking just your heart rate versus variability over a certain amount of time. For example, if you monitor your stress during rush hour traffic, your stress level will always be moderate to high because as your drive and slow down, stop, go, slow down, etc the driver's heart rate is known to increase and decrease accordingly in a matter of seconds to minutes. With that, as your hear rate fluctuates up and down continuously in a short amount of time, that is an indication of some type of stress induced state. Also, you may also notice that your stress level can really only be monitored when you are in a non active state meaning if you move around too much, your garmin will not provide you a current stress level. This does make sense as the majority of us experience stress when we work at our computers or at a meeting, etc.
I've heard some folks say that this measure is "worthless" but if you look at your stress level over time, you can actually see a pattern. Additionally, you can view at the end of each day if you've received enough rest time to make up for the stress you experienced during the day. I will tell you that if I get less than 6 hours sleep and I end up in back to back meetings the following day, the guide will always say that I did not get enough rest and my stress score shoots up. While this isn't perfect science, for me, this baseline works.
A lot of the feedback we've been getting is along the lines of "weirdly accurate" or "strangely knows how I'm doing." Which is great. I think there's a lot of skepticism out there - and for good reason - because there's a whiff of mood ring to the promise of stress tracking. Also, most people tend to think of stress as an emotional state rather than a physiological state, which it is... with a strong emotional dimension, of course.
I had my own Garmin stress tracking success story a few weeks ago when our family moved to a different part of the city.
About 3-days into the actual move, my wife woke up and said she was feeling exhausted even though she'd gotten a full 8 hours of sleep. She showed me the sleep graph in Garmin Connect (vívosmart 3, in case anyone was wondering) to confirm her point. In fact, she'd gotten a full 8 hours of sleep for a number of consecutive nights - but still felt tired. I asked what her stress chart looked like.
She pulled it up, and then stared at it, very surprised.
Days prior to the move were very nicely balanced with lots of those blue resting marks. Exactly coinciding with the start of the move, the blue resting marks disappeared from the chart and it was stress, stress, stress all over the place. Perfect example of how real-world activities (our move) can produce stress that doesn't allow your body to recovery properly even to the point of interfering with the restorative quality of your sleep.
Now you can actually see that happening.
HermanB, what I would really love to know is if I can actually have a 935 automatically submit *my own* personal data back to the FirstBeat ("FB") servers to be used to further "personalize" or correct, if you wish, the predictions.
HermanB, what I would really love to know is if I can actually have a 935 automatically submit *my own* personal data back to the FirstBeat ("FB") servers to be used to further "personalize" or correct, if you wish, the predictions.
Sorry for the delay... too many real things happening sometimes to enjoy a little forum time.
That sounds like a good service, but unfortunately not one that exists at the moment.
It is possible to export data from quite a few Garmin devices and analyze it using our professional sports software (sometimes teams do this for remote training purposes).
here's my all day stress success story. I spend sunday 1-21-18 feeling sick and then mid afternoon puking my guts out. while sitting on the toilet, bored I scrolled through my watch to entertain myself (didn't grab my phone since i ran in in a panic) and my stress widget warned "high stress" would you like to take a moment to relax? when I looked at the data later i was rather surprised
The stress test I use on my fenix 3 is rather robust and reliable. I measure typically a bit after training and in the morning, to see whether I am recovered (or sick). Unfortunately the stress test seems to have some limitations. Currently I have such a low heart rate (Resting HR<33/34) that it comes up with a fail/0 when fully recovered. Using the HRV test (app) I can still get a figure, which is over 100 (it has an inverse scale compared to the Garmin stress test).
I take tests sitting because that how doctors and I test bloodpressure and RHR as well.
But, wrist based heart rate data is not that good for deriving heart rate variability from R-R variation. I would not get too 'stressed' about stress readings using optical HR.
I find it very clever. I did have some pics but upload still seems broken.
However, on a night I might go out and have beers I find that nights stress is very high all night. On normal nights it contains mostly blue. On Exercise days the night is a mixture - starting off high and slowly lowering into blue.
