Burnout, Space Science, and Big Data

How we built a stress tracker that fits in your back pocket

My name is Jane, and I’m the co-founder & CTO of Welltory — a stress & energy management app.

The story of Welltory is about engineers using their skills to help people stay healthy and happy so they can truly thrive. Each co-founder has their own personal relationship with the app, so I want to talk about mine.

Burnout: my personal reason for launching Welltory.

For me, Welltory started with a crisis.

I’ve always thought that pushing yourself, doing the most you can possibly do, is one of the most important things in life. I’ve never spared any energy, taking up projects that required a ton of thinking and seemingly endless work.

Then, at age 33, I burned out.

It’s a terrifying experience for an ambitious person prone to workaholism. All of a sudden, you can’t do the one thing that makes up the very core of your identity: you can’t work. Your brain refuses to do the things it does best.

It was the first time I realized that I have limits, and that I don’t have everything under control.

At this point, a lot of people quit their jobs. They sell their company and start working for someone else, or leave their big corporate job and take up freelance projects.

I didn’t quit my job, but it took me 3 months to put myself back together.

So when people ask me why my cofounders and I decided to make a wellness app, the answer is simple:

This is project is deeply personal. As engineers who work in IT, we know what it’s like to work well beyond your intellectual and physical limits.

Almost all of us have cracked under pressure, and we’ve all watched it happen to our close friends.

The best way to solve a problem is to measure it.

That’s what we did with stress.

Our original idea was romantic and somewhat naive. We wanted to make a tool to help people see if they’re at risk of burning out or getting sick. Something to let them know they were pushing past their limits before it was too late.

We envisioned a data-driven tool, and we had the perfect technique — heart rate variability, or HRV.

Here’s what we liked about HRV:

• It was originally invented as a non-invasive way to track astronaut health during space missions
• It has been around for decades, and is featured in over 20,000 papers on PubMed
• It was already being used by researchers, healthcare specialists, and professional athletes to track stress and recovery processes in the body.
• Fairly simple devices, like chest straps and wristbands, could be used to measure heart rate variability

Luckily, we never needed chest straps or wristbands.

After a bit of tweaking, we applied the same mechanism used in pulse oximeters to write a program that tracks heart rate variability through a smartphone camera.

Our MVP was based on Excel, which we filled with formulas we found in textbooks and science journals. We taught ourselves how to calculate all the parameters.

In a couple months, we were ready to test the first version of Welltory — an app that let users measure their stress and energy levels through a phone camera.

Facing snobbery in the healthcare sector, and overcoming it.

One of our first steps was testing the app’s accuracy, so we got in touch with manufacturers of medical software and devices to see how our app compared to their complicated machines.

There is a bit of snobbery in the healthcare sector, which isn’t always a bad thing — people are used to being surrounded by incredibly talented and highly skilled professionals. Almost everybody we talked to was incredulous at first.

“You’re going to need a ton of sensors for this,” one doctor told us, “we’ve had 20 PhDs working on a similar project for the past decade, and it’s just not possible.”

We still encounter objections like this, and people continue to ask how many cardiologists we employ.

The answer? None. We learned how to measure heart rate variability at home, in our underwear and slippers, flipping through textbooks and collecting the formulas in Excel.

And yet, in spite of the skepticism, our simple device was showing results comparable to complicated machines that took years to develop.

Check out this comparison between Welltory and the Polar strap:

We were on to something BIG.

So what did we do with our discovery?

We just gave it to people. A free app to measure stress & energy anywhere, anytime.

The app was incredibly useful for spotting trends and patterns.

For example, we noticed that gradual drops in energy levels over the course of a week almost always signaled the onset of a cold or flu.

Moreover, we saw that people who regularly measured their stress and energy levels experienced something called the observer effect. They started to subconsciously make healthier lifestyle choices, and saw their stress levels decrease within the first month of measurements.

We decided to turn Welltory into what it is today — Google Analytics for humans, with stress & energy as KPI goals.

We added more data, allowing people to track their habits and surroundings. The idea was to generate graphs that would show people which lifestyle factors were affecting their stress & energy levels so they could use the information to optimize their lives.

Now, we’re the first app that can tell you if walking 10,000 steps a day is good for you.

Just track your steps for a few weeks, then check out the graphs in your dashboard to see if there is a correlation between how much you walk and your stress levels.

We can even tell you if extra time at the gym will make you more productive.

For example, here is a chart from one of our programmers.

See how much more code he writes on days he makes it to the gym?

We can help you answer a bunch of other questions too. Do you sleep ok if you work late, or is it best to stop working at 7? Will a vegetarian diet give you more energy?

That’s how we started our journey. We still have a lot to learn.

Since starting our company a year and a half ago, we’ve learned a ton about health and heart rate variability. Not everything worked the way we expected, and there are a ton of discoveries we have yet to make. We hope to publish some of them soon.

Our goal remains the same — to help people become the best versions of themselves.

Want to see how it works?

Download Welltory for iOS or Android and start measuring your stress and energy levels.