If you could look at all of 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 went over her thoughts about how to promote longevity and better performance over the course of your lifetime.
Holmes has experience at the University of Iowa, and later at Princeton as a coach, as well as having been a national athlete for several years.
She now researches the link between psychological and physical behaviors, and the work of the human body’s autonomic nervous system or ANS.
She also suggests that there’s a way to use vital sign data to map stress and recovery, in ways that help us to become more resilient.
“Flourishing is very much about the capacity of an individual to intentionally behave at a level equal to his or her physical, mental, emotional and spiritual functioning,” Holmes says. Suggesting that performance is a choice, she mentions how doing this research can help us to live in a way that promotes better function long-term.
If we’re firing on all cylinders, she says, we’re more likely to get a ‘demand match’ with a robust ANS, where our body is able to respond successfully to stressors.
Managing variables such as circadian rhythm and sleep cycles, she says, should improve these metrics.
And then it’s partly a state of mind, too:
“There are certain things that are going to upgrade our potential of living, our values, with joy and energy, and there are things that are going to downgrade our potential of living, our values of joy and energy, and building in the things that upgrade our lives is really important, right? And eliminating or minimizing the things that detract is, I think, a really important thing to keep in the front of your mind.”
Testing for Flourishing
It’s an interesting idea that Holmes asks people to delve into, but how can you be sure that you’re achieving these demand match events?
Assuming you can see this from your heart rate changes, as she explains, AI should be able to give you a better window into your body responses.
Here are three main ways that AI can help:
Data Aggregation and Insight
All across the healthcare industry and beyond, AI is helping us to manage data in ways that make it more digestible for humans.
If your metric is heart rate variability, as suggested, you’ll need to get all of 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’s the cornerstone of a lot of modern fitness equipment, measuring things like heart rate, as well as blood oxygen levels, glucose levels, and other key indicators of health. And AI has this in the bag!
Get to Sleep
Before a big test, you’ll hear people telling you get a good night’s sleep…
But how does that work, and how do you improve your sleep cycles?
AI will be able to analyze your sleep in-depth to see when you’re in deep sleep, when you’re in shallower sleep, when you tend to pop awake during the night, and how long you can sleep on average. It will also assess environmental variables like temperature and humidity around you, or your level of hydration, for example, based on detailed data that goes into the model.
Guidance
This is the third one, and it’s a big one – AI will be able to tell you what to do, specifically, to improve your performance and longevity.
In some of the other talks, I’ve heard people talking about using AI as your personal tutor. Sam Altman, for one, has mentioned it in some of his lectures about the promise of AI in the future. It’s the idea that the AI is going to act as a personal mentor or guide through your day and night. It will be able to suggest what kind of diet is best for you, when and how you should exercise, when and how you should sleep, and all kinds of other helpful data-driven recommendations for your day.
So applying that to your heart rate should be able to get you closer toward what Holmes calls “autonomic robustness” – among her other recommendations are ice baths, breathwork and various gear for better body support.
Let’s think about how this kind of idea might 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 leverage these new technologies for good.
