Did Election Night make my heart beat faster?

In the weeks running up to the recent election I became increasingly interested in self-quantisation, partly due to being a bit of data geek but mainly because I’m working on getting into shape.

Having sought out the means to measure my exercise efforts in the form of a Fitbit Charge HR it occurred to me this useful piece of tech and its ability to measure heart rate might be good for measuring more than the impact of exercise.

The notion of politics making the ‘heart beat faster’ has been a persistent part of the narrative of this recent election and so this got me thinking — what if I could measure that?

And so I hatched a plan — using my Fitbit Charge HR I’d measure my heart rate through election night to see just how events affected me.

As an initial test I went to watch Avengers: Age of Ultron (I’d been planning to anyway) to see how representative the heart rate data was of the overall experience….

Thinking back to the events of the film, which is certainly a pretty action packed ride you’d expect to get the heart rate going, the results matched pretty well.

A bit of background

Before I get into the results its probably worth giving a bit of background. Firstly for those not in the UK its worth noting that this election was seen as a pivotal one — perhaps the first time in two decades where UK politics has been re-polarised and each potential victor signally a drastically different direction from one another. In this case with the incumbent Conservative party representing right wing values and Labour a more left leaning perspective. In addition to this the polls up until the day of the election had both of these parties neck and neck.

My personal political persuasion, which is of course was always going to have an impact on the results, is liberal however for reasons I won’t go into but anyone who knows the background will be well aware I voted Labour in this election. I’d also consider myself as someone both interested and passionate about politics and its impact on society but by no means an expert.

Election Night

And so, with the Fitbit firmly strapped to my wrist I sat down to watch the outcome of the UK 2015 Election unfold, making sure I recorded key events in an Excel sheet to map to my heart rate data later on.

I started watching election coverage at 10:15pm and, after what I can only describe as a ‘very emotional time’ eventually finished up at 5am the next morning when the result of the Election, a victory for the Conservative party, was pretty clear.

During this period I purposefully did not check my heart rate, just in case this somehow influenced results and also made sure to note any physical activity that might skew the results, so I could normalise the data later on.

The Results

To begin with its is worth knowing that my normal ‘resting heart rate’ is 65 BPM and that anything above this can be seen as some kind of response to the events of the election.

When it came to matching up key events to my heart rate, as shown in the graph above, it was pretty clear that in most cases elicited a strong response. This was especially the case with the exit poll results at the beginning of the night which suggested a result radically different from every poll reported in the run up to the election.

Even though I was very tired towards the end of my viewing period my heart rate continued to jump in response to results such as the Labour losses to the SNP in Scotland and Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg winning his seat — even though the rest of his party had been essentially decimated in this election.

My heart beat vs the ‘Social heart beat’

As someone who works a fair bit with social media listening and insights I was also interested in how my heart rate data matched the reaction of the nation. And so, using social listening tool Brandwatch and a sample of data from Twitter which featured the main election hashtags I plotted this out.

As you can see from the graph above there is certainly some parity between the volumes on Twitter and my heart rate — although it seems that activity on Twitter started to fall off through the early morning probably because, like myself, audiences began to get tired and the outcome of the election was becoming increasingly clear.

All in all though, a very interesting experiment and I’m very pleased to now have my own heart rate as another data source to play with.

Quite how I’ll use that in the future remains to be seen….