A wrist-worn heart tracker called WHOOP detected changes in activity during pregnancy that may be linked to premature births
By Christa Lesté-Lasserre
31 January 2024
Scientists used the fitness tracker WHOOP to monitor heart rates during pregnancy
WHOOP
Wearing a wrist-strap heart rate tracker during pregnancy may help doctors predict who is at risk of premature labour.
In a previous study, Shon Rowan at West Virginia University and his colleagues recruited 18 women to wear heart-tracking wrist straps from the brand WHOOP throughout their pregnancies.
They all delivered at full term, with their tracker data revealing a distinct decline in heart rate variability – the fluctuation in the time intervals between heartbeats – during the first 33 weeks of pregnancy, followed by a steady increase up to birth.
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Curious as to whether the same pattern occurs in those who deliver prematurely, Rowan teamed up with Emily Capodilupo at WHOOP in Boston, Massachusetts, for a bigger study. The pair and their colleagues analysed tracker data provided by 241 pregnant people, aged between 23 and 47 years old, in the US and 15 other countries. It isn’t known if this data included that from transgender men.
All the participants were pregnant with a single child, born between March 2021 and October 2022. Collectively, they provided more than 24,000 heart rate variability recordings.