Healthzilla launches 60-second fingertip Stress Test
What if someone told you, that you can measure effects of stress from your fingertip in 60 seconds with your smartphone? Now you can, thanks to the adorable purple health monster, Healthzilla.
The Healthzilla team has just released the new feature to serve users without wearable devices and users whose trackers don’t capture all crucial data points for a stress test: resting heart rate (“RHR”) and heart rate variability (“HRV”). Moreover, the team has decided to make all of this free for old and new users.
Stress Test: Measuring RHR and HRV to capture effects of Stress
“We want to make living a healthy life something that’s easy and free for everyone, to remove all excuses,” says Laura Ranin, CEO of Healthzilla
How does it work then, you may ask. In short: Smartphones have cameras and flashes. In a neat bit of technological coincidence, if you put your fingertip on the lens of a smartphone camera with the flash on, the camera can pick up the subtle pulsation of your blood vessels. This means we can calculate your heart rate, and more importantly, your heart rate variability, with a free app.
Wellness: Context for the effects of Stress
In addition to your heart rate data, we take a whole bunch of other data points such as exercise, sleep, mindfulness, and nutrition into account and build a picture of you, your life and your habits to put all of this effect of stress into the right frame. Once we’ve measured your baseline (remember – the measurement takes just one minute a day!), we start tracking the trend over time. Over time we help you with meaningful insights about your stress levels based on what your body is signaling each and every day.
“One of the goals we have is to solve stress. Stress isn't as sexy as dieting, and sells fewer supplements, but is universal and increasingly a global health epidemic. Traditionally it's been a very subjective problem that isn't measurable. Recent advancements in wearable technologies and algorithms allow us to measure proxies to stress symptoms in the form of heart rate variability, so we've created a whole suite of functionality and content around measuring and managing effects of stress with the app,” Laura concludes.
Here are some pro tips for your first measurement.
Take the measurement as soon as you’ve woken up while you’re still lying in bed
Keep your finger steady and breathe normally, your body is still relaxed after goodnight’s sleep
Check out the result and recommendation – our purple monster won’t recommend any strenuous activities if your data suggests your stress test shows elevated effects of stress
Improve the accuracy of the analysis through feeding Zilla more data – are you missing sleep data or mindfulness data? There are lots of free, easy-to-use applications out there for your to start tracking more!
More questions or concerns? Check out our FAQ over here https://www.healthzilla.ai/faq or ping us at https://www.healthzilla.ai/support
If you want to dig deeper into stress, types of stress, effects of stress, and stress symptoms, please read our blog post on what we’re doing and why.