In sickness and in health — the Garmin “Body Battery”
This is a tale that is of possible relevance only to folk who are (a) interested in fitness trackers and (b) of a geeky disposition. For anyone else — nothing to see here, move on.
Preamble — Garmin and Body Battery
I started using Garmin technology a few years ago when I got an Edge device to help me plan and record my cycling activity. This was before the ubiquitous apps of today, but still I found the Garmin Connect website to be a useful repository. Then the Garmin Connect app came along and made access to the data a bit easier. During the pandemic, I decided to get a fitness tracker and getting a Garmin device seemed to be the logical choice; it added the opportunity to record and track various health data points as well as just activity levels. I’ve been using it (a Vivosmart) for over a year and it’s well-integrated into my routines.
I noticed, but didn’t really understand, a Thing on the Garmin Connect app called “Body Battery” — my Vivosmart seemed effectively to be giving me a score out of 100 on my energy levels. The explanation provided within the app is not very helpful and didn’t seem to have much of a bearing on how energetic I felt. The app merely mentions heart rate variability as a key component in the score (this led me down a rabbit hole to find out about HRV, but that’s not important right now). The Vivosmart also monitors what it calls “stress” — though it’s physiological stress that it reports on, not whether you’re having a hard time. For a long time, I basically ignored both Body Battery and stress readings and my life didn’t appear to be any the better or worse for it.
Two things I did notice, though: firstly, increases in the stress reading correlated quite exactly with my taking an alcoholic drink; secondly there was also a reasonable correlation between the quality of a night’s sleep and the amount my Body Battery readings increased overnight. These lent credibility to the device’s assessment of whatever bodily mechanisms were being evaluated to give the final numbers.
The Body Battery and sickness
So, I had got to the point where I took a little bit of occasional interest in the Body Battery readings when, on holiday, I got significantly ill for the first time since starting to wear the Vivosmart. (We’re only talking upset digestion here, so it’s nothing really serious, except of course it felt terminal from the inside.) Long story short, I ate something that disagreed with me; and to help deal with it I unwisely took some herbs that instead gave me really severe mouth ulcers. Consequently, from Monday evening through to Friday morning, I was not a happy chap at all. If you want to know a bit more, then the story can be followed on my blog starting from here, and if you’re interested you might learn a little about Jordan, also.
Once I had recovered, I decided I would go back and see what the Vivosmart had recorded about my bodily state during the episode. Here is the story according to Garmin:
The battery readings, max and min, are at the top and are shown as a line graph along with the stress readings at the bottom of the image — blue means resting (good), orange means some level of stress.
It is striking to me how close the match is between how I felt and what was recorded. I was OK until the afternoon of Monday 23 May, started getting stomach problems that evening which developed into a condition needing the prompt and repeated administration of Imodium during Tuesday and into Wednesday. On Tuesday afternoon, unwilling to offend an avuncular Arab, I unwisely swallowed some dried herbs of a sort of sage persuasion which were supposed to aid my stomach problems but didn’t. Further, by 24 hours later the herbs caused the worst case of mouth ulcers it has ever been my misfortune to experience, making eating, drinking and talking all very painful. I got some gel from a pharmacy which purported to ease the pain and I think it helped a bit, but not all the time.
On the image above, you can see that I was not in a good way for 72 hours, with only a couple of short periods on Wednesday and Thursday mornings, when I was getting anything that looked like rest.
On Thursday evening we met some friends who in a reasonably remarkable “small world” kind of way happened to be in Jordan at the same time as us. Ropey as I felt, it seemed to me that it would have been churlish to stay in my sick bed. So as well as the gel, I took some paracetamol and, with our friends, some gin. This seemed to be a combination of therapies that turned the tide; I was able to eat a little food for the first time in 36 hours and I slept — not perfectly, but much better than previous nights. Looking at the image above, you can see that at the end of Thursday, practically for the first time in three days, I started getting some decent rest to enable recovery — and the recovery carried on through the night.
I hadn’t completely recovered though. Under normal circumstances, the slothful Friday we had would have seen my Body Battery topped right up; but the figures show that the discomfort ebbed and flowed during the day. You can also see, though, that I wasn’t in disabling discomfort during the rest of the day.
I was struck by the tightness of the match between how I felt and what the Vivosmart recorded. I’m really quite impressed by the technology and its implementation, so I shall be using it a little more in the future as part of monitoring my general health as well as just my activity levels.
