Invaluable intro to HRV. App needs much work. – Welltory: Heart Rate Monitor Review

This app is a beautiful and valuable tool for learning more about HRV. It is great to look at a large collection of measurements over time to see how your habits and lifestyle changes affect your stress levels. It is fun for learning and has opened my mind up to a universe of possibilities for enhancing my general well-being. Conducting “experiments” with lifestyle changes has been down right invaluable and amazing for me. I am so grateful for this app because I don’t have to go off “facts” anymore. I can conduct consumer-grade “experiments” on myself to see how environments, habits, activities, thinking style and other factors affect my wellness. HRV is only part of the picture and high HRV may not always be an appropriate reflection of mood. HRV is potentially very valuable and this app offers a great introduction to the concept and measurement. Many aspects of HRV and the direct relevance to physical health are evolving areas of research and have not made it beyond research into standardized conventional medical practices, for the most part. Do not, under any circumstances, use the information from this app to assess your own health in place of consulting a licensed physician. HRV is always changing. The less data you have, the less meaningful your measurements will be. That is a basic principle of statistics. I’ve taken many measurements that differ within the same our. The “facts” presented during the measurement period are mostly meaningless without context. To say “going to be earlier decreases melatonin” and similar statements is tenuous and hard to apply to individuals. These “facts” are pulled, like the concept of the app itself, from ongoing research that is evolving rapidly. Very little is firmly known about sleep in the world of scientific research and applications of research will change dramatically over the next 5-10 years. Again, consult a doctor about your individual case of you are having health problems, including insomnia, period. Many people can thrive under circumstances that make others suffer. The subjective analysis of the data needs a lot of work. General recommendations regularly contradict frequency domain analyses of readings. Gold standard HRV readings need 24 hours of data. Keep that in mind. An HRV snap shot may or may not be an objectively poor assessment of your general state. The best case scenario is to forgo the app analysis and learn to read numbers and look at the averages over time, which the app now allows you to do beautifully. I’m excited for the future of the app and HRV. It’s nice to have a mostly objective way to measure my stress levels and see how they relate to my perceived energy levels and mood. Again, reading analyses in the app do contradict each other. Best to look at averages and compare the data to how you feel over time to see if any correlations exist. Most of the time you may not find any. And I would be cautious of using the apps correlations without personal reflection. You can really grow with this app and learn about yourself if you try to remain unbiased and embrace the randomness of how your respond to things. Do as many readings as you can over a long period of time to get the most objective assessment of your personal HRV. Compare trends with factors you may not be able to account for in the app. There is much to learn with HRV and the evolution of research is worth keeping tabs on.
Review by Korky Bulchik on Welltory: Heart Rate Monitor.