Quantified Self Experiments / Summary

Valuable findings

Which factors influence by sleep.

Caffeine, bedtime start, sickness, vitamin D3 and negative emotions significantly and independently influence my sleep in restorative phases. I'll lower my caffeine intake, will go sleep earlier, take sun / D3 every other morning, and try to reduce stress. Detailed analysis is here.
Outdated: The later i'm going to sleep, the less total sleep time i'll get. My optimal sleep time around 21:30 - 22:30 and will stick to it. Explained here.
Outdated: Average intake of 68 mg of caffeine between 8:30 and 13:00 is enough to destroy ~30 minutes of my sleep in restorative phases. Explained here

Increasing Deep Sleep

Pink noise stimulations increase my Deep sleep by ~11 minutes per night. Additional ~1h20m of DEEP sleep per week seems to be a significant effect. Explained here. Update: After having a talk with Frederik Weber, a sleep scientist, i'm a bit sceptical on my results (stims may just increase k-complexes which leads to more deep sleep time, but not because of increasing slow waves amplitude / count which is a main target).

Physical activity increases mood

Physical activity significantly increases my positive emotions and decrease negative emotions. 1 hour training / 10k steps is enough to get a valuable effect. Explained here

Tracking body temperature

Oura ring temperature seems to be accurate and reliable proxy to core body temperature and sensitive to body temperature spikes caused by sickness. Explained here

HRV and sickness

Standing RMSSD seems to be a useful tool which provides insights about illness onset and recovery and helps make a decision of resuming physical activity. Explained here

Increasing HRV with physical activity

Increase in physical activity leads to increase in HRV. Weekly standing HRV more sensitive to physical activity. Explained by weekly and daily analysis.

Relaxation and HRV

I have found that relaxations like massage acutely boost HRV.

HRV and Deep (N3) sleep

I was able to reproduce some studies which tried to asess HRV during Deep (N3, SWS) sleep by using ECG only data. HRV during Deep sleep derived from ECG only data were comparable to HRV derived with both ECG + EEG. It seems ECG signal is enough to assess HRV during midpoint of Deep sleep (but not enough to predict Deep sleep, at least not  at EEG accuracy level).

Arrythmia

I weared Shimmer ECG for long term and was able to detect arrythmia (Premature Atrial Contractions, PACs). It occurs 200-400 times per day, sometimes even 1000+. Also i was able to capture paroxysmal tachycardia episode.

Circadian rhythm

I've checked my body temperature circadian rhythm with iButton and it seems to be strong enough. Fitbit Charge 4 wrist temperature data also was accurate enough to reveal diurnal changes. Also i've found and measured power of resting HR diurnal changes.

Sleep health

Comparison to healthy population my sleep is fairly good. But i need to focus on lowering awake time during night.

Accuracy

Changelog

I've added changelog to find out fresh news / milestones /  changes in my QS framework.

Wearable stack

Every night, one of:

You can read here about both devices and channel decisions

Wearing 24/7

Every training session

Every morning

Health & Wellbeing articles in scientific review style

Coming soon

Data already collected, just need to finalize.

Interesting resources

Take into account that most QS experimenters doesnt bother with checking accuracy of their devices, blinding, statistical significance, confidence intervals, data distribution analysis, adjusting p-values for multiple comparisons, prone to observer/confirmation bias and other biases. So just add a ton of salt to the QS stories.

Books recommendations

General health and longevity

If you want to know how to improve decision making and account for cognitive biases, increase rationality

Data analysis

Data collection in progress

Weekly

Occasional