“I wanted to see what I could find when I tracked my electrocardiogram over time.” Maggie Delano developed a wearable ECG and activity monitor as part of her masters thesis at MIT. She decided to test it out on herself to see what she could find out about her daily activities and her sleep. What…
There is nothing quite like having to unexpectedly deal with your own mortality. Mark Leavitt experienced that “wake up call” when he spent Thanksgiving in 2007 at a cardiac cath lab. While he didn’t have a heart attack, he left with 3 stints and new outlook. He decided to take a hard look at his “comfortable life”…
Dr. Mark Drangsholt is a long-time self-tracker who also teaches evidence-based medicine at the University of Washington. He has tracked blood pressure and exercise, atrial fibrillation and what triggers it, deep sleep and sex, diet and body fat. In the video below, Mark shares what he learned about his arrhythmia triggers, and how his self-tracking data…
The heart rate is among the earliest biometrics used by humans to take stock of themselves. Before mechanical clocks were invented, this was hard. The first doctor credited with making objective measurements of the pulse was an Alexandrian physician named Herophilos, from the 3rd century, B.C., who used a water clock as his chronometer. Using…
