I did a quick & dirty look into this for my own Oura HR & temperature data of ~1 1/2 years. They expose the lowest heart rate of a night’s sleep (hr_lowest) and correlated that to the temperature delta.
While there seems a very slight correlation it’s worth noting that some of the biggest temperature outliers (for which I know that I came down with a cold incl. fever) don’t necessarily show the most abnormally large HR values.
As others have said already, HR is influenced by tons of factors and one that’s very easy to track is the amount of sleep:
That correlation looks of about the same quality to me, with high HRs being explained by smaller amounts of sleep (no surprise there). If we now also just quickly look at a correlation of temperature values & amount of sleep we can see that the high temperature increases typically get larger amounts of sleep (who’d have guessed that I sleep more when I’m sick :D)
So yeah, looking at the RHR itself seems not super useful if we’re talking the individual level. In addition with further parameters like sleep etc. it might be more useful if one were to make a model, but I’ll leave that as an exercise to the reader
I caught the flu on Sunday the previous week. After a sleepless night I could see a dramatic rise in my pulse on Monday on my Fitbit Alta HR. It scared me too much so I took it off for about 12 hours because it was just TMI.
I am doing much better now and my RHR (or at least Fitbits version of it) is returning to normal.
My pulse did start increasing Sunday from about 60 to 75 beats but the 101F fever didnt really start til Monday.
My sleep was bad for at least about a week before because I was doing a lot of caregiving for my wife who had painful dental surgery. I also might have picked up the virus at my dad’s assisted living center on that Saturday or Sunday.
The final straw was probably when I caught a bad chill while watching deer in our backyard on Sunday evening. After that I felt pretty lousy and started having some body aches and sinus issues.
At the very least, such a project could explore if elevated resting heart rate is in fact an early warning sign for anyone… The key would be to have people not just do resting heart rate measurements, but also take daily temperature readings, track symptoms, and share test results (if any).
Hey @pkuhar, that’s interesting. Over at Open Humans we’re currently looking into how useful such a thing could be! I’ve started exploring my own data a bit more to see how physiological patterns before/after the onset of cold/flu-like symptoms performs. I made a first, reusable jupyter notebook to perform retrospective data analysis based on data from Oura rings.
We’re currently planning out a larger study idea around the use of retrospective data, which would allow to better identify patterns which e.g. your app could use! If that sounds of interest to you, you can join the our slack at http://slackin.openhumans.org/ and come to the #quantifiedflu channel!
Nice! I’m curious about body temperature as an early warning sign, and what tips people have for taking daily temperature readings… Might be a while before I can get a thermometer to do my own readings though
I have been tracking temperature (forehead) first thing in the morning and last thing at night. I am also logging PulseOX and HRV in the morning.
How I hold the thermometer and where I scan seems to contribute significantly to the daily variation.
The HRV number is really dependent on breathing during the measurement window.
I am logging all my data in Apple Health.
No symptoms yet that would indicate exposure to the virus.
BTW I think Apple should ask for user authorization to process temperature data and location for public health purposes. I really like what Kinsa Health is doing aggregating their data into a Health Weather Map as an indicator of where the corona virus cases are growing and the benefits of social distancing.
My understanding is that Apple Health isn’t set up to be able to look at their users data, even if they got permission to do so. The Kinsa Health map is nice, and I’d be happy to contribute data if I had one of their devices, but do they let you opt out?
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The Quantified Flu project that @gedankenstuecke mentioned earlier in this thread has been up and running for some weeks now, supported by him and @madprime; it’s working well and ready for signups. If you’re interested in collecting and potentially sharing resting heart rate data matched with symptom tracking, will you sign up?
I’d really like to grow this project, if there are any relevant networks or mailing lists you can share it on, please do. I wrote a post on the QS website with some introductory background that you can link to or copy:
One thought on this would be to get people collecting data at least one week before they try the new COVID-19 vaccines to see if it can predict when they got the shot!
Scripps Institute (Eric Tolpol, MD)in California is running a resting heart rate study called Detect, relative to detecting COVID-19. You might check with them.
I have signed up. There is an app that, once invoked, reports a resting heart rate to the study after you connect it to, e.g, Fitbit (if you have a Fitbit). I start it each morning to ave it report my resting heart rate.
Once week, or so, it asks me to report symptoms, if I am sick, and so far, I have not been ill from anything.
I have been following Topol for a few years, and find his insights invaluable, plus he is “in the industry” and can ferret out fakes and lies pretty easily. I would encourage you (and anyone else) to sign up for it.
Without timely testing and timely results, this may be one of the only ways to avoid problems.
