"Activity trackers" on retreat

A place to discuss health and fitness, including healthy diets, etc.
Post Reply
User avatar
desert_woodworker
Posts: 31
Joined: Sat Oct 23, 2021 10:45 pm
Location: Southern Arizona/USA

"Activity trackers" on retreat

Post by desert_woodworker »

I haven't yet worn a Fitbit while attending Ch'an retreat or Zen sesshin, but I wonder how the device would interpret (and "score") the long periods of seated meditation that these practice periods include and entail.

The device logs "sleep", interestingly. I'm supposing that it might log the meditation periods as "sleep", interrupted by brief times of wakefulness (walking meditation in Chan, and kinhin in Zen).

The device senses different stages of sleep by the way, using certain discriminants that its built-in, integrated sensors and software detect and store. For example, the device logs and identifies periods of Deep sleep; Light sleep; and, lastly REM sleep (the rapid-eye movement, dream-stage of sleep). It has only a few kinds of sensors, so it's interesting that the device can make these desciminations "intelligently" (gets them "right", I mean). The device possesses an accelerometer, with which it senses movement; also a blood-oxygenation pair of LED lamps and sensors pressed against the back of the wrist, which senses pulse-rate and blood-oxygenation level (and so is sensitive to an aspect of breathing). Thus, again, movement, pulse-rate, and O2 levels can be sensed with the sensors on-board.

In sleep, the different stages of sleep have different profiles of pulse-rate, movement, and O2 (breathing details), and the software makes determinations from these inputs from the sensors as to which stage of sleep the wearer is in at what clock-time, and logs this internally to its memory.

The watch needs at least two hours of sleep before it logs a time-period as a sleep period, though, I suppose in order to allow the software to make its discriminations and identifications about the particular wearer, under the particular conditions of that day (night).

Well, on retreat, blocks of sitting can (and may) last longer than two hours (followed by other such blocks), and even though a single sit may last just 30 minutes or 45 minutes, followed by a few minutes of walking, the watch may string all these sits together and consider them (in software) to be a sleep period, interrupted by frequent trips, say, to the bathroom. Of course, the wearer may choose not to walk at all, especially if one has developed a samadhi practice and can easily sit long extended sits for several hours (I've never found the walking to be mandatory; if a person can sit-through, probably so much the better).

It would be interesting to see if the watch "decides" that some parts of sitting blocks are "REM sleep", "Deep sleep", or "Light sleep", or even "Wakefulness".

On retreat, one would not want to pay much attention to the watch, and probably could not (nor would want to) try to download its collected data to laptop or phone even at the end of a day, say, before bed. Retreat time is too valuable and rare to carry out extraneous activities. But the watch would take data continuously for 4 or 5 days before its battery charge would die. The wearer COULD bring the charger along, I suppose, and charge the watch once after day 3 or 4 so it would continue taking data for the full 7 or 8 days of retreat, without causing oneself too much distraction (or, maybe not).

Sometime after retreat the watch data could be downloaded and given a look: "Does zazen look like "sleep" to a Fitbit?"

Maybe someone here has done this.

One could do this at home, certainly, but usually (speaking for myself) the discipline is not there to sit longer than two-hour blocks at once, whereas on retreat there's support (and enforcement) to do so.. One might need 3 hours or more (even with sitting broken briefly by walking) for the Fitbit to be tricked into treating the sitting time as "sleep".
Cactus Makes Perfect --Joe
avatamsaka3
Posts: 879
Joined: Mon Apr 08, 2019 6:11 am

Re: "Activity trackers" on retreat

Post by avatamsaka3 »

Maybe someone here has done this.
I've intended to do something like this to study myself during practice. Medical-grade equipment would be necessary to ensure proper statistics are collected.
Post Reply

Return to “Wellness, Diet and Fitness”