Stress Monitoring Wearables

[Owl]

Work is offering cash incentives to do healthy things and part of that includes wearing a fitness tracker. While looking into different fitness trackers I discovered a model that claims to monitor your stress levels via heart rate variation and give a vibration notification suggesting doing breathing exercises when your heart rate spikes in a way suggesting your really stressed. This sounded quite interesting because I have a history of being unable to tell when I'm getting stressed out or depressed until it gets acute and then I might have difficulty functioning well until I address the underlying causes. Kind of like driving a car with a broken gas gauge, never know when its going to go empty. So a biofeedback stress monitor sounds potentially valuable.

Has anyone else used such a device and have insight on how useful or not it is?

 

[Isadoorian]

Fitbit PurePulse™ Continuous Wrist-Based Heart Rate

This seems to be up your alley (Keep in mind the site's going to be for the Canadian page so you'll have to change your Region for more accurate pricing and retail carriers, might get a pop-up asking for that upon going to the site)

E: There's also the Charge 3 - Shop Fitbit Charge 3™ Advanced Fitness Tracker

I have the Charge 2 and it offers the same features basically; unsure of what'd be different between the two (Charge 2 and Charge 3) but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

[Vince]

I had a mood ring back in the '70s. It only told you how warm your finger was, but the act of wearing and occasionally looking at it was calming just from the act of bringing occasional focused attention to what your mood was. Required no batteries either.

 

[Owl]

I think most of the stress monitoring wearables I saw didn't go beyond having a chart that you could review to observe after the fact that your stress may have been elevated at, oh say 3PM yesterday. So far the only multi purpose devices I have spotted that claim to do in the moment alerts for stress awareness are the Vivosmart 4 and the Galaxy watch. I'm certain there could be more, this is kind of a niche feature that doesn't get as much advertising. I think there was a company looking to produce a single purpose device they were marketing as the "Reveal Band" which was actually targeted at autistics so that their caretakers could monitor them, but they gave up without actually going into production. I'm kind of just as glad they went dead, they were proposing having kids wear a stress monitor as a ankle bracelet. I mean, how many places in life would permanently wearing an ankle monitor mean something bad, wheras as multi use devices don't have a stigma and are intended for the person wearing them to use them.

 

[Owl]

If the fitbit Charge series can prompt for relaxation exercises based on heart rate instead of just offer them on request I'd be curious. Let me know what its like.