New Trackers Claim to Measure Your Stress, But Do They Work?

New fitness trackers claim they can go beyond counting people's steps and measuring how long they sleep, to instead telling people when they're stressed out.

The goal is to help people identify the things that trigger their stress, so they can avoid them if possible.

Most of the devices that offer such stress detection work by measuring the change in the interval between heartbeats, a measure known as heart rate variability. For instance, the Tinke by Zensorium, which costs $119, plugs into a phone and measures heart rate variability from the thumb. HeartMath's Inner Balance sensor, which costs $129, uses an ear lobe clip and a plug-in phone sensor to measure heart rate variability

But although heart rate variability has been used for decades to measure stress, fitness trackers may lack the capacity for data processing to make accurate measurements. And without additional information and context, there's no way to know whether a dip in variability is caused by stress, or positive excitement, experts say. [The Best Fitness Tracker Brands]

Managing stress

People don't always recognize the physiological signs of stress, and their memories of past stressful events can be colored by their current mood, said Daniel McDuff, a researcher at Affectiva, a Cambridge, Massachusetts company that analyzes emotion from facial expressions.

But noticing stress can help people cultivate a more mindful attitude to their bodies, which could have practical benefits, said Frederic Shaffer, the head of the Center for Psychophysiology at Truman State University in Kirksville, Missouri. Reducing stress can improve people's health, he said.

For instance, if people could identify that certain people, places or activities stress them out — and, for ...... 

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