Meet your Health Score
Life changing insights from a holistic view of your health!
When we first launched Gyroscope, one of the main problems was that most people didn’t have enough data to look at. The Apple Watch didn’t exist, and most people didn’t have many apps or devices to track their health—something we were on a mission to change.
The world has changed significantly since then. Most people are now constantly tracking their heart rate with a wearable, or at least track their steps, mood and workouts with their iPhone. Now many of our Pro members have too much data to fully understand.
The data that we track daily—heart rate, places, happiness, cortisol, nutrition, caffeine, running, VO2max, sleep quality, HRV, productivity, running, cycling, walking, meditation, blood pressure, blood glucose, ketone levels, protein intake, fasting, and so much more—is so detailed and frequent that even trained doctors may have trouble seeing the big picture or finding patterns.
Fortunately, we have built a new system that not only can sync and analyze these large amounts of data, but actually gets more accurate and intelligent as more things are added. Some people have been testing the beta for the past year, which has let us make it extremely accurate—and even detect when people are about to get sick!
We are calling this new feature Health Score and it is the most life-changing product we’ve built.
We’re now enabling it for all Gyroscope Pro members, and sharing more details about the science of how it works. This release is our next big step in our quest to help our members live healthier and happier lives.
How does it fit into your life?
Many people enjoy playing video games. We see what our character is doing, what our current task is, and what needs to improve. This gives a strong incentive to keep leveling up—and most importantly have fun in the process.
Our goal with Gyroscope is to make managing your health as effortless and fun as playing a video game, rather than a boring chore to skip until the New Year resolution or your annual doctor visit.
The new Health Score turns your health into a game, with health bars for your real life!
All the key aspects of your health—your fitness, your sleep, your diet, and even your immune system—now have simple health bars that you can easily check to manage and improve.
It is just like a game, except instead of leveling up a virtual character, you are helping yourself lose weight or live longer.
How does it work?
Rather than just telling people what to do, we want people to understand why their daily habits are significant, and give tools to see the impact on key metrics like lifespan, bodyfat, mood and productivity.
For example, rather than just telling you to sleep more, you can see the quantified impact that missing sleep has on your score. Then people are actually excited to sleep more, making increasing their readiness and HRV into a game rather than a chore. This creates positive feedback loops that are critical in building new habits and making health a key part of your life.
Until now, people have had to look through many different apps and charts to try and decipher which is the biggest issue to fix. Now we can just tell you.
A holistic view of your health
Almost any doctor will agree that health is a combination of many many factors. There is no one silver bullet that will solve everything. It requires balancing everything properly.
Understanding which metrics are good and bad will let you focus on the right thing. For example, if you are sleep deprived, but spending all your energy working out harder, that won’t help much. Using the Health Score will let you work smarter, not harder, to more efficiently improve your health.
You have enough data to start using it!
Don’t have a wearable? That’s fine. Everyone can track their sleep, steps, mood, places and workouts with the new Gyroscope app, which is enough data to start getting a reliable score. These can be easily set up from the Track tab and give you a powerful history to start out.
Adding more wearables and trackers makes the experience even more powerful, with realtime data from your body coming in constantly. We suggest wearing a heart rate monitor at night (like Apple Watch, Oura ring or Fitbit), and to check your weight and bodyfat daily with a scale.
Every data point entered into Gyroscope helps make your Health Score more accurate and give a more balanced view of your health.
This has been the main reason for all the integrations and trackers we’ve added recently—introducing things no one else tracks like stress, energy, places, travel, restaurants, jetlag, and many others.
Constantly learning as you add more history
The more data you have in Gyroscope, the smarter the score becomes. People who have years of history already will have a very accurate score, and those who are setting it up will find it rapidly improves.
It learns your daily patterns and what your baseline is to understand what is good or bad. Each person is unique, so each Health Score adapts to its owner. The score takes into account your long-term average, recent changes, anomalies, ideal amounts from scientific studies, and many other signals.
Add your DNA for deeper personalization
The DNA integration helps make your score even more precise.
For example, some genetic variants process dopamine slower and make people more susceptible to stress. For those people, detecting high cortisol will lower the Health Score more significantly, and we will prompt you sooner to meditate and sleep more intensely. Others with the fast processing variant (GG) may actually perform well under mild stress. Knowing these details about your brain and your body lets us tailor the Health Score specifically for your needs, rather than just the average person.
Similar customization applies to how much caffeine people can handle before the high caffeine warning comes on, and other genetic variants that give us hints to your diet and exercise response. It is important to note that these genetic variants are just slight percentage variations in traits and behavior, so if you don’t have access to your 23&me DNA data, then it isn’t a big deal and you can still get a lot of value out of Health Score.
We will be constantly hiring more engineers, doctors and scientists to help us make the Health Score as accurate as possible and push the limits of what we know about the human body.
What is a good score?
The Health Score ranges from 1–100. People with unhealthy habits and body metrics may be only around 50–60, while athletes that have optimized everything could be in the 90’s.
We have calibrated the score so each point increase is proportional to living a year longer. A 10 point increase in your Health Score means you are likely to live 10 years longer!
How does it know? Many factors like being overweight or obese, having high blood pressure, unhealthy LDL levels, consistently high cortisol levels, being sleep deprived, or weakened immune system have been shown to have a negative impact on longevity. Reducing all of these common risks has a significant impact on your health and wellness—and based on the latest medical data likely means you will live longer!
The Health Score is the first time people can concretely see how their behavior relates to overall health and longevity. Skipping sleep for a few days may not seem like a big deal, but seeing that it could reduce your life by 5 years if done consistently puts the decision in a much better long-term context.
How it relates to your productivity & well being
When we first built the Health Score, we thought it would be pretty static for each person—perhaps something to check monthly or yearly. Instead, we discovered it fluctuates a lot for most people!
This makes sense, since life is also unexpected and constantly changing. Some big factors that can affect it are travel, jetlag, stress, holidays, parties, drinking, missing a few nights of sleep, and many other external changes. Many of these can happen at the same time, causing even bigger changes.
The score will go up and down a bit, so you shouldn’t stress out much about a particular number. The fantastic news is that the score isn’t just some constant based on your DNA, but something that is fully under your control. Your actions today will determine your score next week. If your score says you are sedentary all day, you can start walking more right now to increase it.
Starting a new workout routine, eating more healthily, meditating regularly, fasting, or prioritizing sleep can have a huge positive impact on your metrics and quickly get your Health Score going up. Seeing that upward trend is a great motivator that you’re on the right track and to stay at it.
How to avoid unnecessarily getting sick
One of the key components is the strength of your immune system. With enough data and history, the Health Score accurately models how your immune response changes.
When you are more likely to get sick and have a weaker immune system, you will see a warning in the app along with recommendations for how to fix it.
How I’ve used it to understand my health
Personal Story, by Anand Sharma
We built the first prototype of Health Score about a year ago, and I’ve been using it since then to constantly test and improve it. I’ve personally oscillated between around 60 and 80 over the last year. The difference between those two scores is tremendous.
When I have a higher Health Score, I’ve been consistently more productive, having more energy, and generally much more happy. It means I’m a lot less likely to get sick or injured, which is a great bonus, and lets me handle things like high stress or staying up late without ending up in bed for the next week.
Most importantly, it is a totally different state of consciousness— almost like being a different person. Things like mental fog or feeling too tired to work are totally gone once the body is better balanced. Having been on both ends, I take my health a lot more seriously now and would do almost anything to avoid falling back down to 60 again.
The automated tools and warnings provide enough guidance for most people to manage their own health. For people that want more guidance, we’ve been working on a new Gyroscope X program that gives advanced coaching to help people get through their plateaus and improve their daily routine.
Some tips for getting the best Health Score
We’ve designed it to be very passive and easy to use daily!
- Wear your Apple Watch or Oura ring every night
This is very easy but important. You just need to wear your heart rate monitor and then go to sleep, and we handle the rest. You can charge it briefly in the daytime, but the night-time data is where the powerful HRV, resting heart rate and other measurements come from. The small watch battery charges rapidly (more than 1% a minute) so it’s not like a phone which needs 8 hours of charging to get back to 100%.
Charging it when in the shower and getting ready every morning is usually enough!
Setting the Apple Watch to theater mode and do not disturb is also recommended, so the battery lasts longer and so it doesn’t wake you up at night or annoy you with bright lights. If you are worried about comfort, switching to a better band (the velcro one is the best one) and making sure it is a snug fit but not too tight can help as well.
People who don’t like wearing watches can try wearing an Oura ring at night, which syncs to Gyroscope with the new integration. Fitbit and Garmin also track resting heart rate, but don’t track HRV data.
2. Set up all your tracking in the app
The track tab makes it easy to enter data, with integrations or manual input, and see all of the available data types that may be missing. Bodyfat is an especially useful metric that has a lot of long-term health implications, so keeping that updated at least once a month is recommended.
Some things like Places and sleep are automatic, while others like weight, blood pressure and blood ketones can be manually entered in just a few seconds. Adding as many as possible will give the most balanced and holistic view of your health.
3. Use the mood tracking every day
Health is much more than just working out. High stress is one of the common issues we see, and can be detected by daily mood tracking.
Track your mood at least once a day to start measuring detailed stats on your happiness, energy, stress, and more. If your stress is detected to be too high, then the score will guide you to try meditation and other activities that are proven to help. This is important for everyone, but especially people who work at startups or in high-pressure jobs.
4. Check the Improve tab regularly
The Health Score gets recalculated a few times a day, so you can check it occasionally to see how yesterday’s actions affected it. If you have any new continuous monitoring—like an immune system alert—those will be prominently shown at the top to give you an advanced warning.
What’s your Health Score?
Ready to get started? You can now check the Improve tab in the app and website to start seeing your own Health Score.
You can tap the score to see an explanation of what is rated good and bad, and what else you can add to make it more accurate.
See you at 100!
What people are saying
Special thanks to all of the users who have been beta testing the Health Score and sending us continuous feedback to make it better! And especially all the people who got sick to test out the immune system monitoring.
We hope with the right warnings it will never happen again.
Gyroscope totally predicted that I was going to be sick
— Aaron McGurk
“I have found that the healthscore has really helped to give me a quantifiable number as to where I am for the day. Every morning I open the app and input my mood then look at my score. Did I get the rest I needed? Should I push myself today or take it a little easier? For the longest time I was stuck at a score of 70–75. Once I started really paying attention to the score and adding meditation and maybe cutting back on my training volume I started to move up. Now I am consistently around 85–87”
— Matt Tort
“I struggle to make sense of the negative health effects at the intersection of these behavioral data points. I have noticed three times that I got sick after my Health Score warned me (sleep is important y’all 😩). I def notice the difference between 60- 70 & 70–80 …”
—Jordan Clark
If you have any feedback for us, or stories about how you’ve used Health Score in your life, we’d love to hear them. Tweet at us or send a note to support@gyrosco.pe and we will be in touch.
