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If you could look at all your heart rate data over a day, a week, a month, what would it tell you? Maybe more than you think.
In a recent TED talk, Kristen Holmes discussed her thoughts on how to promote longevity and better performance over the course of your life.
Holmes has coaching experience at the University of Iowa and later Princeton, and has also been a national athlete for several years.
She now investigates the connection between psychological and physical behavior, and the functioning of the human body’s autonomic nervous system, or ANS.
She also suggests there is a way to use vital signs data to map stress and recovery in ways that will help us become more resilient.
HUD element ui medical research.
“Flourishing is very much about an individual’s ability to behave intentionally at a level equal to his or her physical, mental, emotional and spiritual functioning,” says Holmes. She suggests that performance is a choice and mentions how doing this research can help us live in a way that promotes better functioning in the long term.
When we’re firing on all cylinders, she says, we’re more likely to get a “demand match” with a robust ANS, allowing our bodies to respond successfully to stressors.
Managing variables such as circadian rhythm and sleep cycles should improve these statistics, she says.
And then it is partly also a state of mind:
“There are certain things that will enhance our life potential, our values, of joy and energy, and there are things that will degrade our life potential, our values of joy and energy, and incorporating the things that do that. upgrading our lives is really important, right? And eliminating or minimizing the things that are distracting is, I think, really important to keep in mind.”
Testing for flowering
It’s an interesting idea that Holmes is asking people to delve into, but how can you be sure to make it to these question match events?
Assuming you can tell this from your heart rate changes, as she explains, AI should be able to give you a better understanding of your body responses.
Here are three key ways AI can help:
Data aggregation and insight
Across the healthcare industry and beyond, AI helps us manage data in ways that make it more digestible for people.
If your metric is heart rate variability, as suggested, you need to collect all that data in real time and put it into a model that can show you when you’re succeeding, when you’re struggling, and how these trends and cycles interact.
That is the cornerstone of many modern fitness equipment, which measures things like heart rate, but also blood oxygen levels, glucose levels and other important health indicators. And AI has this in the bag!
Go to sleep
Before a big test you hear people say you’re getting a good night’s sleep…
But how does that work and how do you improve your sleep cycles?
AI can deeply analyze your sleep to see when you are in a deep sleep, when you are in a shallower sleep, when you tend to wake up during the night and how long you can sleep on average. It also assesses environmental variables such as temperature and humidity around you, or your hydration level for example, based on detailed data used in the model.
Accompaniment
This is the third, and it’s a big one: AI can tell you what to do, specifically to improve your performance and longevity.
In some other conversations I’ve heard people talk about using AI as your personal mentor. For example, Sam Altman has mentioned it in some of his talks on the promise of AI in the future. The idea is that the AI will act as a personal mentor or guide day and night. It will be able to advise you on what type of diet is best for you, when and how to exercise, when and how to sleep, and all kinds of other useful, data-based recommendations for your day.
So by applying that to your heart rate, you should be able to get closer to what Holmes calls “autonomous robustness” — among her other recommendations are ice baths, breath work, and various equipment for better body support.
Let’s think about how this kind of idea can be applied as we move forward with personal wearables. This is all very interesting in the context of what AI can do for us as we try to harness these new technologies for good.