I think that when we can optimize our performance, as any athlete does, not only does it benefit us, but it benefits our patients. —Natalie Krane, MD
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May 2023
Heart rate variability has long been used as a marker to indicate wellness and state of health for sports performance, emotional states, and even social interactions. Low values of heart rate variability indices have been found to correlate with cardiac events like myocardial infection, atherosclerosis progression, and heart failure. Other studies found correlations between low heart rate variability values and coronary artery disease and even sudden death. Many other conditions of acute and chronic inflammation, such as diabetes mellitus, stress, metabolic syndrome, and even clinical depression have been associated with heart rate variability values.
Polar Electro (known as Polar) was founded in Finland in 1977 and developed the world’s first wireless heart rate monitor. Polar manufactures a range of heart rate monitoring devices, as well as accessories for athletic training and fitness, and measures heart rate variability. They make a variety of sensors in watches and chest straps, coupled with apps and services (not only for humans but also for horses!).
Whoop is a fitness tracking and fitness coaching wearable and app that uses one’s physiologic data to simultaneously improve training and fitness. The latest version promises new biometric tracking, including skin temperature, oxygen saturation, gentle waking that’s optimally timed based on sleep needs and cycles, and, interestingly, your percentage of “recovery.” Whoop uses a combination of one’s heart rate variability, resting heart rate, and sleep performance to tell you if your body is “ready” to perform and what it needs to rest on a scale of 0% to 100%. You can see what range your body’s recovery is in: green for ready to go, yellow as for maintaining health and the ability to handle another strenuous day, and red, which suggests that you need to make time for rest and active recovery.
Arena Strive by Arena Labs is a performance coaching platform built specifically for frontline clinicians. This platform emphasizes helping clinicians achieve “high performance” as measured by self-awareness of one’s physical, mental, and emotional states, stress adaptation based on tracking the body’s physiological responses to stress over time, and, as for all professional athletes, rest and regeneration based on how well the body recovers from stress. This last idea of “rest and regeneration” certainly isn’t a concept that has been historically applied to physicians, surgeons, or any clinicians in healthcare, but hopefully it will be.