We spent eighteen years
making stress measurable.

Our team was the first one to be funded by NIH to track stress from wearables in real life rather than in a lab. When we started in 2007, there were no wearables available so our team built the first wearable to collect physiological data in the field.

People ask us why it took eighteen years to get it right. It took this long because we wanted convience and accuracy for people in their everyday lives, not just in a lab. Physiological data is messy and difficult to extract intelligence from about our mental states, especially when collected from conviently worn devices like smartwatches. We failed multiple times but refused to give up.

Our first success come with the Mobile Open Observation of Daily Stressors (MOODS) study. Our aim was to validate our AI model and gain a deeper understanding about the reasons for stress in people's lives.

The validation tested how ready our model was for world-wide deployment. Most stress tracking research trains a model and tests it on the same data afterwards, which tells you the model fits that data and not much else. We deployed ours pre trained, with no fine tuning on the study at all. If it worked, it would work for anyone, unchanged.

Then something happened we had not designed for. Across a hundred days, the hundred and twenty two participants simply seeing their own data started changing their behavior on their own, in fourteen distinct ways, and their stress came down: ten percent less intense, and ten fewer stressors a month. We did not expect that. Most stress interventions do something in the moment and nothing usually lasts past the study.

That is when we realized that our AI was ready to help people change their behaviors.

Almost everyone treats stress as the price of doing well. It is also a driver of chronic disease, but that damage is slow and invisible, so the connection never feels real. We needed a way to make it real, and we found one: your heartbeats.

Your stress response was built to save your life. It raises your heart rate and pushes energy to your limbs so you can fight or run. It still does that today. But you are in a chair, nothing uses that energy, and it turns into low grade inflammation instead, which is a known path to chronic disease.

That rise in heart rate is what we measure as Workload Heart Rate. Here is the part that changed how we think about it. You get a lifetime budget of heartbeats, and spending it slower means living longer: five beats per minute off your resting heart rate is worth about a year. Spend heartbeats on exercise and you get them back, because your heart runs slower the rest of the day. Spend them on stress and they are gone. Exercise is an asset. Stress is a liability.

It diminishes performance too. Under stress your brain is busy calming your nervous system, and it will take the decision that makes the stress stop over the decision that is right for you or your team.

It also impacts your relationships with people. Under stress you have less patience for others. If you lead a team, the impact is even bigger. This is why our executive users check they are calm before going to important meetings. They also track their calmness live in meetings to ensure they make better decisions.

This part is harder than it looks. Tell someone they had a stressful day and you have added disappointment to a bad day. Interrupt them while it is happening and you have broken their work and probably made the situation worse.

That is why just in time intervention has not worked for stress, and adding large language models to it did not fix anything.

So we built around the thing that did work. Reflection is what moved people in the MOODS study. We show stress and calmness overlays on peoples calendars to help them find their triggers.

On top of self-reflection goes a predictive nudge carrying your coach's own words, sent before a hard moment while you can still do something about it, rather than in the middle of one when you cannot.