Chart your personal daily HRV curve
As you might know, the Apple Watch collects HRV data quite well, and it reflects, to some degree, how relaxed / healthy your heart is. A…
As you might know, the Apple Watch collects HRV data quite well, and it reflects, to some degree, how relaxed / healthy your heart is. A good primer on how to understand HRV can be found here.
For my own quick and dirty analysis, I exported all my HRV data from my iPhone / Apple Watch using the app HealthExport. The CSV file it gives you can be analysed however you want, in Excel or Numbers.
I decided to look at my 3500 HRV measurements for the past 3 years, based on changes in the 24h cycle. You can transform a timestamp into a time value from 0 to 1 in Numbers with the =timevalue() function, and then sort the measurements based on this timevalue to get all your measurements from just after (0) to right before midnight (1).
The resulting chart, for my 3500 individual measurements, looks like this:
We quite nicely the curve, which goes from 35 at the end of the day to 50 for the early morning til noon, and then slowly decreases from noon until midnight.
I was surprised to see such a clear pattern in that massive amount of personal data.
It’s amazing to think of all the opportunities long-term health data like this can offer us, if we only find good ways to analyse them. It’ll take a long time until doctors routinely use such data for their patients, but just think of how useful this can be to understand your own body better and see how you react to things happening in your life.