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Fitbit Inc (FIT)

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How to use wearables to lower your resting heart rate

A slow beat is the sign of a healthy ticker, here's how to measure it

Wednesday

June 17, 2015

By Kieran Alger

@kieranalger

Heart rate tracking is becoming a must-have in the latest fitness tech. It's hardly surprising when you realise that how fast your heart beats when you're doing nothing at all reveals a lot about your overall health and fitness.

Unsurprisingly, a lower resting heart rate (RHR) being linked to some very big health benefits like the reduced risk of heart disease.

Essential reading: Best fitness tracker

The good news is that with the flood of heart rate monitoring wearables it's now easier than ever to monitor - and improve - your own resting BPM. While we can't promise to give you the dicky ticker of an Olympic athlete, our fitness tech expert Kieran Alger has some tips on how you can use the latest tech to hit a better beat.

What is resting heart rate?

First up, let's clear up what we mean by resting heart rate. Basically RHR refers to how fast your heart beats per minute (BPM) when you're at complete rest, and by that we mean when you've been lying down and haven't moved for ten minutes or so.

Generally speaking, the lower the number, the fitter you are. The average adult will have a resting heart rate between 60-100 beats per minute (BPM) while athletes are likely to have a much lower BPM, somewhere between 40-60 BPM. Spanish cyclist and five times Tour de France winner, Miguel Indurain famously had a resting heart of just 28BPM.

Get fit today: Check out our running and fitness guides

As with anything relating to our bodies, there are lots of factors that influence your RHR. Genetics can play a part but lifestyle tends to have the biggest bearing, with the familiar friends and foes of stress, diet and exercise levels all impacting on how hard your heart works at rest.

It's a story that we all know well. If you don't smoke, don't overdo the alcohol, eat a healthy diet and do regular exercise, the likelihood is you'll have a more positive RHR.

People who are overweight tend to have higher heart rates too. When you're carrying a bit more lumber, your heart has to work at a faster pace to supply blood and nutrients to your entire body. So staying lean is also important.

Why is resting heart rate important?

On top of being a simple barometer for heart health and general wellbeing, knowing your resting heart rate has other great advantages too. Most new fitness wearable and sports watches used RHR stats in tandem with your maximum heart rate, to dictate your heart rate based training zones. Some devices do this automatically but most require you to input your RHR and know this vital stat will add accuracy to other stats like your calorie burn.

Regularly checking your resting heart rate and comparing it to a benchmark BPM can also reveal stresses on the body, particularly in those training regularly.

Professional sport coaches monitor their athletes' RHR stats daily and use this data to help them make judgement calls as to whether their stars should train that day. A significantly raised BPM (more than 7BPM above the normal average) can be a sign of overtraining or, even an incoming cold or illness.

How to measure your resting heart rate

You can get your RHR without any modern technology. Some kind of clock, your fingers and an ability to count to 100 will suffice but if you own a heart rate monitoring wearable like the Apple Watch, the Garmin Forerunner 225 or the Fitbit Surge, then it's probably easier to let that do all that tricky number stuff. Not to mention many of the latest devices will also keep a record and adjust your heart rate training zones to be more accurate next time you workout.

You need to be fully relaxed to get a truly accurate resting heart rate. Just sitting down isn't really enough. A good time to do it is when you first wake up, provided you exit the land of nod naturally and rather than being scared awake by a noisy alarm. Once you're awake, continue lying down and rest peacefully for 5 minutes. Once 5 minutes have passed, check your heart rate.

Alternatively you can induce the same fully relaxed state at any time during the day by lying down completely still on your back for 10-15 minutes, without distraction. Once you've reached a state of complete and total inner peace and calm, then clock your heart rate and there you have it, your resting heart rate.

It's worth pointing out that it's perfectly normal to see fluctuations of 3-4 BPM and the more regularly you can test the more useful your average will be. Plus you'll be able to chart your progress, and remember it's important to measure yourself against yourself rather than other people.

Use tech to lower your resting heart rate

Even if you're hitting 100 BPM there's good news, the same tech you use to clock your RHR can help you lower it too. How? Let's quickly go back to the simplified science.

When you exercise your heart has to work harder and during workouts you're essentially strengthening that pump, so that when you return to rest it doesn't have to work quite as hard to deliver the same amount of blood around the body. Put another way, over time regular exercise gradually slows down your resting heart rate by stimulating the parasympathetic nervous system and lowering your BPM.

Before we talk exercise, we're going to pretend that if you're a smoker you've stopped, you've put down the chips and picked up a bowl of nutrient-packed green veg and you've cut your drinking to a cheeky glass of red rather than a bottle. Well done you.

Now on to the sweaty bit. There are three forms of training that have all been shown to have a positive impact on heart rate - interval training, resistance training and regular aerobic exercise like running or cycling - and plenty of good tracking tech to help you hit those training goals.

Best tech to find your resting heart rate

Fitbit Charge HR

With heart rate tech built into Fitbit's latest activity tracker, you can get a live read out of your pulse. It will keep tabs on your pulse at rest and display the result within the app, plotting its course over a period of the last 30 days.

$149.95, fitbit.com | Amazon

What The IPO Of The Country's Best Known Wearables Company Means To Digital Health

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Fitbit’s blazing-hot IPO has been one of the most anticipated public offerings of 2015. The company’s sleek products have popularized the concept of wearable health and fitness trackers, and even prompted tech giants like Apple and Samsung and LG to launch their own gadgets. With the wearable tech industry poised to take off, Fitbit’s IPO marks a watershed moment in digital health.

Fitbit is going public tomorrow (NYSE:FIT), raising more than $700 million at a valuation north of $4.1Billion.  The offering is one of the largest U.S. IPO’s this year.  Regardless of day of IPO stock activity – dramatically increasing from its offering price of $20 per share or hovering at the price at which it opens — the public debut of a consumer wearables company from the digital health sector is a big deal.

At the highest level, Fitbit’s success story proves that naysayers were wrong: there is robust demand for consumer digital health products. The FitBit IPO represents a new trend of health consumerism. As consumers are becoming more financially responsible for their health outcomes (due in large part to the ACA), they are clearly responding by taking a more vested interest in their health and becoming more equitable partners in managing their own wellness.  Americans are becoming keenly aware of the growing epidemics of obesity, diabetes and other chronic illnesses. As the rapid growth of Fitbit demonstrates, people are clearly willing to regularly monitor their own health goals outside annual checkups at the doctor’s office.

Part of Fitbit’s effective business model is that its devices – wearable clips and wristbands –  interface beautifully with iOS and Android software, making them seamless additions to everyday life. This means Fitbit is not catering to a niche market of early adopters or extreme athletes. Everyday folks can make use of Fitbit’s smart scale to track weight loss, or wrist monitor to track improvements in cardiovascular health. Activity tracking, such as step counting, is by far the most popular use of wearable devices. Yet other popular uses include heart rate monitoring, sleep monitoring, blood pressure monitoring, and caring for the elderly, according to a survey from ON World.

Prior to the runaway success of Fitbit, revenue potential of personal health trackers was murky.  One of the most important questions any new health startup needs to answer is: who pays?  Fitbit is a great example of the digital health sector crossing over into healthcare, which raises the complex question of who foots the bill – the private payer, employers, the government or the consumer?

But because Fitbit positioned its devices as fitness trackers (without making any explicit health claims), the company has been able to tap into a previously untapped market, the consumer, while avoiding the complicated and painful sales process of convincing employers, payers and the government to foot the bill. Consumers today are well educated, and keenly aware of the dangers of a sedentary 21st century lifestyle. They are buying Fitbits to change their behavior and avoid ending up in a doctor’s office after the onset of chronic disease.

Fitbit’s IPO is just the start of a coming wave of auspicious digital health companies. Investors will recognize many untapped markets, exits, and billions of investment dollars more will start flowing into the sector (according to StartUp Health Insights, more than $6.5B was invested in digital health in 2014, and $2.8B has been invested already this year). Fitbit also gives the investor community a successful business model to lean on and proves that consumers will pay for health and wellness. Health and tech companies alike will be smart to take a few lessons from the Fitbit story. Although it sounds like a well-worn cliche, the key to the company’s success really has been its focus on the consumer. A new consumer device cannot be clunky. With an elegant user interface and simple installation, the software and hardware is easy to use every day. Notably, the company did not shy away from hardware.  Other health tech companies should heed this lesson. Technology can only enjoy widespread adoption if the customer’s needs are prioritized over additional functionality or frivolous features. In addition, Fitbit’s business model is scalable. Fitbit is now quietly expanding into the corporate world, offering its fitness trackers and software for employee wellness programs.

Fitbit will face challenges. The company is embroiled in a lawsuit with competitor Jawbone over intellectual property issues. Tech heavyweight Apple is making a formidable play in the field with its AppleWatch. Intel acquired Basis Science in 2014 (disclosure: Basis Science was a StartUp Health company).  Xiaomi, a Chinese company, also sells wearable devices and is a likely competitor in the global market.

Yet regardless of Fitbit’s long term value proposition, the recent IPO will be considered an important turning point: consumer health is going mainstream. It’s now a highly rational proposition to invest heavily in consumer-facing digital health solutions.

http://www.derekchristensen.com/hiring-milkshakes-and-other-secrets-to-product-development/

For those who want more on this topic.....................

HIRING MILKSHAKES (AND OTHER SECRETS TO PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT)

“People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!”

– Theodore Levitt, Professor of Marketing, Harvard Business School

Stop thinking of your product as something customers buy. Think of it as something customers hire. Imagine you own a fast food restaurant. What job is your milk shake hired to do?

Harvard Business School professor Clayton M Christensen, along with Intuit founder Scott Cook and Taddy Hall, published a phenomenal Harvard Business Review article about jobs-to-be-done. Here’s an excerpt below.

Hiring Milkshakes

A “job” is the fundamental problem a customer needs to resolve in a given situation. To illustrate how much clearer the path to successful innovation can be when marketers segment by job, consider an example from the fast-food industry, where companies historically have segmented their markets along the traditional boundaries of product and customer categories.

When a fast-food restaurant resolved to improve sales of its milkshake, its marketers first defined the market segment by product — milkshakes — and then segmented it further by profiling the customer most likely to buy a milkshake. Next, they invited people who fit this profile to evaluate the product. Would making the shakes thicker, more chocolaty, cheaper or chunkier satisfy them more? The panelists gave clear feedback, but the consequent improvements to the product had no impact on sales.

Then a new researcher spent a day in a restaurant documenting when each milkshake was bought, what other products the customers purchased, whether they were alone or with a group and whether they consumed it on the premises or drove off with it. He was surprised to find that 40% of all milkshakes were purchased in the early morn- ing. These early-morning customers almost always were alone, they did not buy anything else and they consumed the milkshakes in their cars.

The researcher then returned to interview the morning customers as they left the restaurant, each with a milkshake in hand, and essentially asked (but in language that they would understand), “Excuse me, but could you please tell me what job you were needing to get done for yourself when you came here to hire that milkshake?” Most of them, it turned out, bought their shakes for similar reasons: They faced a long, boring commute and needed some- thing to keep that extra hand busy and to make the commute more interesting. They weren’t yet hungry but knew that they’d be hungry by 10 a.m.; they wanted to consume something now that would stave off hunger until noon. And they faced constraints: They were in a hurry, they were wearing work clothes and they had, at most, one free hand.

When the researcher asked what other products the customers might hire to do this job, it turned out the milkshake did the job better than any of its competitors. Bagels were dry; with cream cheese or jam, they resulted in sticky fingers and gooey steering wheels. Donuts didn’t carry people past the 10 a.m. hunger attack. Bananas didn’t last long enough to solve the boring-commute problem. In contrast, it took 20 minutes to suck a viscous milkshake through a thin straw, hands remained clean and stomachs were satisfied until lunch. It didn’t matter that the milkshake wasn’t a particularly healthful food because that wasn’t the job it was being hired to do.

Once it was understood which jobs the customers were trying to do, it became very clear which attributes of the milkshake would do the job even better and which improvements were irrelevant. How could they better tackle the boring-commute job? Make the shake even thicker, so it would last longer, and swirl in tiny chunks of fruit — not to make it healthy, because customers didn’t hire the milkshake to become healthy. But adding the fruit could make the commute more interesting — drivers would occasionally suck chunks into their mouths, adding a dimension of unpredictability and anticipation to their monotonous morning routine. Just as important, they could move the dispensing ma-chine in front of the counter and sell customers a prepaid swipe card so that they could dash in, gas up, and go without getting stuck in the drive-through lane.

Understanding the job and improving the product on dimensions of the experience so that it does the job better would cause the company’s milkshakes to gain share against the real competition — not just competing chains’ milkshakes but donuts, bagels, bananas and boredom. This would grow the category, which brings us to an important point: Job-defined markets are generally much larger than product category–defined markets. Marketers who are stuck in the mental trap that equates market size with product categories don’t understand who they are competing against from the customer’s point of view.

For me this is what is going on, as Bob West reported from the SID panel. QUIK has worked very hard and has empathy ( deep understanding) of what job the wearable OEMs needs to hire a sensor hub to do. The other guys are selling what they have on the self today.

Clay Shirky also wrote about that same research (and gave a few more details, such as the name of the fast-food company) in his book Cognitive Surplus:

When McDonald’s wanted to improve sales of its milkshakes, it hired researchers to figure out what characteristics its customers cared about. Should the shakes be thicker? Sweeter? Colder? Almost all of the researches focused on the product. But one of them, Gerald Berstell, chose to ignore the shakes themselves and study the customers instead. He sat in a McDonald’s for eighteen hours one day, observing who bought milkshakes and at what time. One surprising discovery was that many milkshakes were purchased early in the day – odd, as consuming a shake at eight A.M. plainly doesn’t fit the bacon-and-eggs model of breakfast. Berstell also garnered three other behavioral clues from the morning milkshake crowd: the buyers were always alone, they rarely bought anything besides a shake, and they never consumed the shakes in the store.

The breakfast-shake drinkers were clearly commuters, intending to drink them while driving to work. This behavior was readily apparent, but the other researchers had missed it because it didn’t fit the normal way of thinking about either milkshakes or breakfast. As Berstell and his colleagues noted in “Finding the Right Job for Your Product,” their essay in the Harvard Business Review, the key to understanding what was going on was to stop viewing the product in isolation and to give up traditional notions of the morning meal. Berstell instead focused on a single, simple question: “What job is a customer hiring that milkshake to do at eight A.M.?”

If you want to eat while you are driving, you need something you can eat with one hand. It shouldn’t be too hot, too messy, or too greasy. It should also be moderately tasty, and take a while to finish. Not one conventional breakfast item fits that bill, and so without regard for the sacred traditions of the morning meal, those customers were hiring the milkshake to do the job they needed done.

All the researchers except Berstell missed this fact, because they made two kinds of mistakes, things we might call “milkshake mistakes.” The first was to concentrate mainly on the product and assume that everything important about it was somehow implicit in its attributes, without regard to what role the customer wanted it to play – the job they were hiring the milkshake for.

The second mistake was to adopt a narrow view of the type of food people have always eaten in the morning, as if all habits were deeply rooted traditions instead of accumulated accidents. Neither the shake itself nor the history of breakfast mattered as much as customers needing food to do a nontraditional job – serve as sustenance and amusement for their morning commute – for which they hired the milkshake.

Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus, pp. 12-14

Clayton Christensen, chaper 6, title (the famous CC)

What job did you hire that milkshake for?

Many products fail because companies develop them from the wrong perspective.
Companies focus too much on what they want to sell their customers,rather than
What those customers really need.  Whats missing is empathy:a deep understanding
Of what problems customers are trying to solve.

Consider Bob Wests report on the SID meeting, of those on the panel, including INVN, QUIK
Was the only one who has done what Clayton Christensen asks,  QUIK does have the needed empathy (deep understanding)for the wearable/IoT OEM.

bodes very well for the next 6 months.