A Bengaluru-based software engineer came up with an unusual way to understand what affects his stress levels at work. Instead of relying on assumptions, he used data from his fitness tracker and matched it with his office calendar to see whether certain meetings triggered noticeable changes in his heart rate.
The experiment, which combined wearable technology with workplace data, quickly drew interest online. While some people found the idea clever and useful, others pointed out that many factors beyond meetings could influence heart rate.
He Linked Heart Rate Data With Meetings
Software engineer Pankaj, who goes by @the2ndfloorguy on X, shared details of his project in a post on the platform.
“I hooked my whoop to my work calendar to find which coworker gives me the most stress. Thanks to Fable, I reverse engineered whoop to pull per minute heart rate. nd matched spikes with cal events and attendees I now have a leaderboard and I think about it daily. few info masked for obvious reasons ;),” he wrote.
According to the post, Pankaj used data from his WHOOP fitness tracker to monitor changes in his heart rate throughout the workday. He then compared those changes with meetings listed on his calendar and the people attending them.
Along with the post, he shared two images explaining his setup. One image showed the WHOOP fitness tracker strapped to his wrist while a laptop screen displayed lines of code and data analysis.
The image highlighted the technical side of the project and how he processed the information collected by the device.
The second image shows charts and rankings based on the heart rate data. Some names and details were hidden, but the screenshot suggested that he had grouped meetings based on how much they affected his stress levels.
People Had Plenty To Say
The post sparked several reactions from users. A user wrote, “This could easily be profitable. just sell it as “team performance analytics” and let enterprises figure out who creates the most stress before layoffs.”
Another wrote, “Interesting idea, but it depends.. for one meeting you could go to another floor, before another one you just ate something w/ sugar and when you met with senior_dev it was N hours after last meal and you just connected to meet via laptop after working on boring stuff.”
“Need to replicate this workflow asap,” a person said. “Sell this! I will buy it,” a different person said.
A comment read, “I am stealing this but hooking it up to my kids’ screen time.” Someone wrote, “Damn, this is smart.”