[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to the Heart Rate Variability podcast. Each week we talk about heart rate variability and how it can be used to improve your overall health and wellness.
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Welcome, friends, to the Heart Rate variability podcast. I am Matt Bennett. I'm here with a great guest today who has done some really amazing work. I've been digging into his article and just really fits directly into my passion. I know a lot of our listeners passion around HRV and HRV biofeedback as a really great treatment or supplement to treatment. So I'm excited to have Christian Ranta on the show today to discuss his work and his interests in heart rate variability. So, Christian, welcome to the show. Just for our audience, give us an introduction of yourself and what got you interested in heart rate variability.
[00:01:15] Speaker B: Hey, Matt, thanks so much for having me. Yeah, I'm Christian. I'm the CEO and one of the founders of Merrow Health. So we are a lifestyle based virtual clinic treating mental health disorders. And basically, biofeedback is one of the hardware variability. Biofeedback is one of our essential components.
Yeah, I've been an HRV nerd for quite a while. I mean, like, I've been an aura user. I had the first generation, so it's been a while already.
So aura definitely kind of opened my eyes, actually, even before that. So I actually used to work a bit or kind of work with our founder, Petary, and he's a fellow Finn. So I'm originally from Finland as well. And when I was building my last company, so I've been around this now, building my third healthcare business. But I was building my last company in Finland back in the days, and I then ran across Peter and he kind of actually got me excited. There's also a company called first beat. I don't know if you've talked about it on the podcast, so actually, I was kind of many times used to wear the first beat technology and kind of very cool, tested that and got all the data there for myself. And, you know, being a biohacker, being a nerd for quite a while already.
[00:02:30] Speaker A: Yeah. Awesome. So I'd be curious then, integrating that into your thinking around health and mental health. So it's sort of, as you, I think you said you're on your third, you know, company here so congratulations. If you're still doing this the first two months, that went at least okay to do it a third time.
Where did you start to learn about HRV? I'd love to know. Like, when did you think about starting to integrate this into your current work?
[00:03:01] Speaker B: Yeah, that's a great question. So, I mean, I basically.
So, again, it started, like, maybe mid two thousands, 2005, 2008, something like that. When I first started reading and hearing about HRV again, I've been a biohacker for a long time, so I've been, like, always super curious. And my first company was a medical device company, and then my 2nd, 2nd business was basically a digital health business. They were both in diabetes, and then I was kind of deep in diabetes, and I was excited about just understanding the mind and body much better.
And then after I sold my last company in 2015, I then decided to found my current company, Mental Health, in 2016. And me and my co founders, we had all kind of experienced struggles with mental health in our families and myself, unfortunately, I lost my brother, my oldest brother Peter, to suicide.
[00:03:56] Speaker A: Oh, so sorry.
[00:03:57] Speaker B: Thanks, man. Yeah, so that was unfortunately, like, why I went into mental health care. And when I looked deeply into mental health care, I actually spent my first few months before founding the company. Merrill Health, which is the current company, spent a lot of time, like, digging deep and trying to understand what's really going on in mental health care. First of all, like, what's working, what's not working.
And what I realized is that there's actually, first of all, there's a huge access problem. Like, not enough providers, not enough therapists. That's something which is obvious from the surface. But then when I dug deeper, I read a ton of research and literature, and what I realized is that actually the real world outcomes in mental health care are really bad. Roughly two thirds of people who receive care today, whether it's, like, therapy or drugs or a combo, about two thirds of people are not getting better, and one third of people are getting better, and only one 6th is getting into remission. So full remission from, like, depression, anxiety. And I found that, like, baffling. Like, is this, like, the best we have today? Like, that's crazy. And that's why I kind of, like, really wanted to rethink the whole thing. Like, I wanted to contribute in mental health care, but I didn't quite know how. And one thing that came to me almost like an epiphany, it was kind of like in a dream. And in some of my meditations, where I got this idea that I need to build kind of more measurability into mental health care as well. There needs to be more objective biomarkers in addition to building a kind of a much more holistic treatment. So just doing therapy or medication is not going to change. Like, no matter how you deliver it, whether it's telehealth or brick and mortar, it's not going to fundamentally change if the problems, what's causing these issues, depression, anxiety, PTSD, whatever. If it's not, if therapy and antidepressants haven't worked so far, they're probably not going to work from here on either. That much better, regardless of the format, the medium of delivery.
Basically, that's why I started thinking about this much more holistically. And that's where HRV came into place, because I was then thinking about, like, what could be a great biomarker that could help, at least if not be a diagnostic biomarker, at least be a state, like a state change biomarker. Is there something that could indicate that someone's learning to regulate their autonomic nervous system better? Is there maybe something that could show progress?
And that's when I came up, that's when I found HRV biofeedback and all the work from Inakazan and Richard Gebert and other people and Paul Lehrer as well.
That's when I realized that, okay, this is something that could actually work. And especially what was really cool that I didn't know before, that this was back in 2016, that actually biofeedback as such, or HIV biofeedback is also very beneficial as an intervention in mental health care.
So these things combined, I got really excited that this could provide us with objective data, assuming people use this and do the same thing.
[00:07:13] Speaker A: That pesky problem is you have to use it.
[00:07:17] Speaker B: Yeah, totally, totally. But then we basically started utilizing this as part of our treatment for mental health disorders. And, yeah, so, I mean, like, we saw fantastic results, like, in our piloting and in our testing. And, you know, that's kind of also, you were referring to the one of the papers that we've published with Harvard and with Inokazan and with some other people.
That's basically what we found was that, you know, when we added HIV biofeedback, on top of like, sort of like more general psychotherapy with some of the mind and body components, more holistic components, we saw roughly a doubling of efficacy. Almost a doubling of efficacy.
[00:07:59] Speaker A: So awesome.
Yeah. And so, you know, just kind of curious as you develop this new company and models around it, you know, how are you positioning HRV amongst? Because I think it's not the only thing you're doing as well. So what's. Talk to me about the model that you're bringing to the market.
[00:08:23] Speaker B: Yeah, sure, sure. So, yeah, so we are a national provider, a national telehealth provider of mental health treatment. And what we do is that we have people first come in for an intake call with a therapist, with a master's level provider, and then that's kind of a diagnostic call. That's an assessment and a motivational interview. Like, what are your challenges? We collect some, like, you know, some rating scales like PHQ and GAd, which are for depression and anxiety symptoms. And then we basically make a kind of diagnosis and an assessment on like, is this person eligible and does the person want to start in treatment? If they want to start, then they kind of work in an app that we've built. And the app is basically like a weekly curriculum of different themes and topics where we teach people like psychoeducation, basically like CBT skills, mindfulness skills, and then biofeedback breathing skills. Then there's nutrition, like food and mood. There's like sleep, there's exercise recommendations. There's a community, a peer support community. So all these things reside in the app. And then through the app, you can also do video calls with your therapist, with the same therapist, same provider that you started with, and then you can also be chatting with the provider. And all this is kind of like built into a curriculum.
And that's kind of where we then ship people a biofeedback device. So we basically have. We use an off the shelf device, currently the Kaido Kido, or I don't know if some people may know it, like Kyde. So a keto device or Kaido device. And we basically kind of repackage that into a marrow package, which we ship every participant who starts in our treatment and they receive. Basically, the keto device is basically like a heart mouth device. It's a pulse oximeter. You clip it on your ear or on your finger, and then you do like, pace breathing. And the biofeedback, the practice or the lesson in a way, is in the app so that you can kind of, you know, kind of do that in the app and see your progress, get feedback. And we built some custom algorithms where we adjust the pace and adjust the difficulty level in a way, depending on the person's personal data, their personal signal. So we first collect some data and then adjust the practice accordingly. And then people do it and they get feedback and then also our providers, they see all the data as well. So they kind of follow and work with the patients through a dashboard, through an electronic medical record in the dashboard where they see their biofeedback data, they see their PHQ and GAD, the depression and anxiety scales and ratings when people progress. And then they can chat with the patients and just in general be kind of much, much more present and supportive and kind of be there for people when they're going through tough times. Very cool.
[00:11:14] Speaker A: So do you just do the biofeedback? Do you also do the tracking of heart rate variability as well over time as kind of an outcome measure, too?
[00:11:22] Speaker B: Yes, we do. So we collect that kind of like a baseline HRV, like sort of like the baseline measurement. It happens every month, and that's kind of like the resting state HRV measurement. So it's just a very standard. Is it like now maybe a few minutes of recording that in the morning, like once a month? And so that we also collect that data and kind of, you know, use that for looking at, like, changes and, you know, what's going on. So, of course, like, it's HRV, as you know, is, like, impacted by so many things. So the baseline HRV is kind of like a less clear of a state biomarker, I would say, in many occasions, but it sometimes may be indicative of things. But then what's really interesting is the biofeedback session data, like, you know, after each session, after like a week or a month of practice or several months of practice, that starts giving, like, more insights in how people are learning how they're, like, progressing things like this.
[00:12:17] Speaker A: Interesting. So I'm curious, again, under the weeds a little bit here with, you know. So you're really using the biofeedback data more as also with tracking progress in services. Am I hearing you right there? And I'd love to understand kind of how because one of the challenges I think I've had when thinking about that is, is you're artificially probably, I assume, with your app as well, kind of manipulating the breathing, which is going to increase heart rate variability. I'm not going to say artificially because you're actually doing it. So I'm curious how you pull out and that post biofeedback or during biofeedback data to really get sort of some sense of progress in care.
[00:13:09] Speaker B: Yeah. So we basically track, like, resonance. So it's, you know, I guess you're familiar with the resonance, like, you know, aligning, aligning the, you know, the kind of decrease or increase in, decrease of heart rate with, you know, the, you know, the. Sorry, what is called the respiratory sinus arrhythmia. Yeah, like kind of tracking that and aligning that against the breathing case. So the very sort of like standard resonance breathing. And as people learn to get into resonance, we show them how much time they spent in resonance in each session, and then we adjust the parameters and also teach people how to better reach resonance. And then we show them the progress on how much time they spend in resonance. So our focus is basically because we're also fortunate to have advisors such as Paul Lehrer, Ina Kazan and Richard Geverge. So they've all been helping us and publishing with us several of our papers, and they've also been helpful in helping us understand how do we create more like a practical application of biofeedback in a remote setting so that we can help people just learn the skills and then make progress.
[00:14:18] Speaker A: Very cool. Very cool. So I'm curious, how do you. Because being a mental health provider myself in my career, I kind of had to come to HRV, you know, Vandercult, the body keef score and then polyvagal theory. So, so it's been a, you know, a learning curve. And I would say you probably your, you know, average mental health provider might have heard of heart rate variability, might have an Apple Watch. Whether or not they're tracking HRV or not, I find it's about 50 50 in the mental health field. So I'm curious whether you're finding these or you're training up the professionals. What kind of is the onboarding for? For them to really get them to understand how to integrate this into.
It sounds like telemental health services that they're providing.
[00:15:11] Speaker B: Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, that's very important. So what we do, so we have something called Merrow Academy. And Merrow Academy is basically an online learning environment where we built all of the trainings for our providers. So we definitely spent quite a lot of time in the online learning. Before people, before therapists can start practicing at Merrow health, they basically need to go through some of the online learning, online courses and we teach them the basics of biofeedback and HRV and mental health and some of the studies and how it's used and some of the cases and all that stuff. So it's all included. And actually, not only that, we also educate people or our providers on also the food and mood stuff, like why does your diet matter so much? And what, another thing we didn't get.
[00:15:56] Speaker A: In graduate school either. So that's awesome.
[00:15:59] Speaker B: Yeah, totally. And also exercise. I mean, like, I don't know if you saw it, but there's recent meta analysis, was it last year when it came out? Which showed that dance, like dancing, is actually way more effective as an intervention for depression than pretty much anything else. And way, way, you know, beats antidepressants as an intervention.
[00:16:20] Speaker A: Zumba. Let's start prescribing Zumba and jazzercise.
My wife loves those, so she can't, I'm six seven and have no rhythm whatsoever, so maybe I do need to get my butt into one of those classes, but she tries to drag me all the time, so.
[00:16:37] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:16:40] Speaker A: Awesome. And I'm just curious, like, what is the. As you train up mental health providers, what is kind of some of the reactions that you get? Because it's one thing to train them and then to integrate them of looking at data. You know, I started to love heart rate variability because it did measure what I was doing as a mental health provider. The surveys will definitely always have their use and we shouldn't throw those out and nor would I ever advocate for that, but I never really was able to get a picture of what's going on underneath the skin is that nervous system I was trying to heal was kind of a mystery until it came out as a state sort of behavior. So I'm just curious as some training up, probably some folks with little information about it.
Have you seen any insights from your providers about them maybe integrating HRV for the first time and how they view their work?
[00:17:37] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, like, definitely very often, like, when we hire new providers, like, many of them have never done hrv bio feedback or again, as you said, they're only, like, on a surface level familiar with HRV. So usually, like, I mean, like, we are a very integrative clinic.
[00:17:52] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:17:53] Speaker B: And we also attract providers who are integrative minded in a way, or holistic minded. So I don't think it's like, such a steep learning curve for most people at least. They're very curious and open minded. Like, okay, what is this stuff that, I kind of like the company already, so what is the stuff that they're talking about? I want to learn. So I think we, on average, get, like, a lot of people like that.
So usually the, usually the response or feedback is very positive from our providers, and then we, of course, go through a lot of patient cases. And what does it mean if someone's saying something like this? Because biofeedback doesn't work for everyone. Either. There are some people who maybe they have already more oxygen in the blood isn't a great thing for everyone. So there's also different cases that we need to go through and understand who does it work for and when should we try to encourage people to practice more or when should we not? So we've created a lot of different materials also for our providers on educating them on how to apply, how to use it in their practice with us. But again, we also collect all the biofeedback data from all of our patients, from all of our providers. And we can see a lot of, like, we have a lot of data to understand, like how does it work for different kinds of people? And, you know, there's so much unpublished data. I also mean, like if anyone's interested in publishing more out there, I'm just calling out for folks, we have like ton of data that we're, you know, we'd be happy to collaborate on with someone who wants to publish. So, yeah, that's great.
[00:19:30] Speaker A: And so, you know, this is kind of a curiosity of mine. So I'd love to just get maybe, and I always allow my guests, if you want to speculate versus something, somebody's going to come back and hold you to when the meta study gets published. But I've been really curious about, because a lot of the literature, and we touched on this maybe a little bit earlier, sort of looks at biofeedback, HRV biofeedback as sort of an activity. And I've even heard really people I respect and I don't have enough to disagree with them is like, you know, boy, you get in residence, once you get your residence frequency breathing rate, the better you adhere to that breathing rate, the higher your low frequency max min is going to be. So really almost taking HRV biofeedback and putting it, while I love the box it goes in, kind of goes into this box. And I'm curious, as somebody who sort of tracks the biofeedback data as data.
I'm curious and I'm curious what you think is I find with my HRV biofeedback, if I do it in the morning, my scores are way higher, my low frequency is way higher than it is in the evening. Now, I still get a lot of benefits out of my, I sleep so much better than I used to. So getting that in an hour or two before bed, I'm not giving that up, even though my scores are kind of pathetic at times.
And so I kind of wonder, like, as you're thinking about biofeedback, and do some tracking with it.
Are you seeing that? Yeah. Like, people doing it in the evening or people may be self reporting that I'm doing it while I'm stressed or while I'm happy.
Are you seeing that maybe we're getting more data than I think we initially, maybe a few years ago thought we were getting?
[00:21:23] Speaker B: Yeah, that's a good question, to be honest. Actually, we haven't looked into the morning and evening like, and again, this is, again, back to my last comment about, you know, we love to kind of work on someone who's, who's keen on kind of analyzing this data, but we haven't looked at the differences. But I guess, like, just from my personal perspective, again, also having, you know, I've been a meditator for ten plus years and pretty much every day and then also done a ton of biofeedback, HRV biofeedback. I think, at least for me personally, like, mornings are usually like a time when at least, at least on average, the nervous system is like more relaxed and it's easier to get into resonance. And then in the evening when you're like kind of, you've been through the day, there's all sorts of things going on, then it is definitely harder. But I think one thing I don't know, you maybe experienced this also yourself because you talked about the sleep and stuff. What I think is something which we quite often also tell our participants or people who come to us, is that if they have trouble sleeping, biofeed is a great thing to do in the evening, to kind of just at least if you're not going to be able to get to grade scores or you're not completely going to get to parasympathetic state, at least you're lowering your pseudopathetic response and then you're going to be probably sleeping better. So that's definitely something we're seeing and we're talking about that quite a lot with people. So I think that's, and I just.
[00:22:50] Speaker A: Think it's fascinating because usually, like, my RMSSD scores are also, they support that trend as well as usually my morning reading. Then I do all the healthy stuff, I do kind of the mindfulness and all that. And I could get it to peak up a little bit later in the morning. But then I look at those two data sets versus like 08:00 on in the evening and it's a, my RMSSD drops and it seemingly, my low frequency during my biofeedback is also dropping. Obviously one with controlled breathing, one with regular breathing. So different sort of metrics were using, but both are measuring the state in some way, shape or form. So I just find it fascinating as low frequency is sort of a training measurement is how well we're doing while we're doing our biofeedback. Not something necessarily we want to high all the time, you know, might be. It sounds like you're using some of that data as tracking progress in care, which I've just been curious about, you know, over time, because I think that there's. There's something going on there with me, but, you know, if I judge the world on what's going on inside of me, I'd be very skewed.
[00:23:59] Speaker B: It's.
[00:23:59] Speaker A: It's a very skewed data set, my friend.
[00:24:02] Speaker B: Yeah, no, that's true. But, like, I mean, like, I guess, like, like you said, it's. It's not something that can always be. It's not like 100% objective in every person. I mean, like, in a sense, because there's differences and it, you know, depending on what other things are going on in your body and stuff like that. But, like, basically what we see is that the change, like, people's chains over time predicts also their improvement with their depression and anxiety. So if people are able to kind of, you know, again, it doesn't work 100% for everyone, but it works for a lot of people. I mean, like, I think we see that, like, two thirds, if not more, benefit from doing the practice. And then I think we can even increase that once we're able to. We're still working on perfecting the user experience and even building a better kind of user experience and feedback and how we present it and for different people and how do we instruct different people at different times? And so there's, like, it's a universe of its own to, like, make it even a better experience. I think we can still significantly improve the kind of, like, efficacy, but already now, for those people who get the benefits, who it starts working for, and they see their stage kind of changing, it's a great predictor of their overall success in healing. And it's also something which, you know, people like also sometimes, I guess, I'm not sure if you've experienced this yourself, but sometimes people also get, like, very, very, like, peak experiences. Like, sometimes people may get, like, very, very, like, they start getting. Once they get into it, they start kind of building those pathways. They start also getting, like, very, very high, kind of quote unquote high experiences or positive experiences. So I think it's a great tool, but it also takes a while. And I think also what, you know, we've kind of heard from many people is that many of our patients that when you're in a kind of, in a rot, it takes quite a lot, a lot of time and practice. Like, reroute those connections and, like, rebuild the, I mean, like, the nervous system is also, I guess, you know, neuroplastic. So it just takes practice.
[00:26:06] Speaker A: Well, that's why I love. Because, I mean, I always love the idea because I think it's graspable, is like, we're working on changing states, but the real goal in therapy and long term is to tray, you know, really develop new traits. You know, if you have a trait of depression for whatever reason, obviously we want to change that. That's why people come to us as therapists, mental health, you know, we want to change that trade over time. And, you know, as I'm sure you can, you know, identify this as well. Now, 15 years into my mindfulness practice, I'm a different person, you know? Now, if you met me on the street, you might not recognize that, you know, oh, this guy's different. Hugely different than 15 years ago. But I trust, like, your wife, and you live with me every day. Yeah, yeah. Like, only appliances piss me off nowadays, people, not so much anymore. But if the toaster doesn't toast and I can't fix it. Yeah, you know, you can still see some sympathetic activation, but besides that, yeah, you gotta really, you gotta really push me for that fight response. But, yeah, so it's just, I mean, that's why I love your integration with mental health services. Cause that's. Again, it's so complimentary of what we're trying to do. And for me, like, it's the best homework we could ever give people. Like, we always made people journal. That was our thing. But now, like, with the HRV biofeedback, and I love how you're integrating that into your models. Just, just spectacular. I love it.
[00:27:37] Speaker B: Appreciate it. Yeah, I mean, like, it's also, like, if you think about it, it's also something very practical that you can do for yourself. And again, most people will start realizing that after a while. Sometimes in the first session, sometimes after a few sessions, they start realizing that I am in control.
Like, wow. Like kind of a light bulb goes on. They're like, hey, wait a minute. Like, my psychiatrist or someone else back in the days told me that, oh, you're going to be on these medications for the rest of your life because it's a genetic thing. I'm sorry, you're going to need to take this, whatever. And that's just other B's. Like, first of all, there's no proven genetic component in depression. And then like, anyway, there's just a lot of these things going on. But then when people get the hang of it, then when they kind of realize that, hey, with my own action, I can actually impact my states. And, you know, it works also very beautifully for panic attacks and anxiety. Anxiety attacks.
So I think that's empowerment. And I guess what I'm trying to say is that, like, that's part of what we want to do. We want to really help people get empowered and learn the tools and skills so that when, you know, when we're not trying to hold on to them forever, like when they kind of leave our practice, great, then they have the skills. We hope that they are equipped with all these skills and tools so that they can live a better life after that.
[00:29:00] Speaker A: I love it. I want to go back for a second before I go forward. And having been in the healthcare arena, digital health, you mentioned with diabetes, I wonder if you knew back then what you know now about heart rate variability. So rewind the clock as your, and I know our technology has made this a whole heck of a lot easier to do, but I wonder, let's just say the technology was the same. Back when you started that first company, you were able to integrate HRV. How, I wonder, as somebody who's worked with physical health, just how heart rate variability, if you knew what you knew now back then, how that might just have just tweaked. I don't know if it would have changed dramatically. I know you're thinking around physical health knowing that you're doing a more integrated model now, too.
[00:29:53] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, like, back, back in the days, I was clueless about biofeedback on HRV. I mean, like, I started my first company in 2005, I think.
So back then I didn't know much, so I just learned about it. I started learning about it in the next few years. And then initially, I think my learning curve was pretty like, you know, not, not too steep. So I kind of learned slowly and started hearing about it. I had some early, some of the early wearables. I was always a geek on trying all the stuff and buying all the different wearables.
[00:30:26] Speaker A: You had that drawer, too.
[00:30:31] Speaker B: And then I think, yeah, then I started, I've always been a curious guy, so I started reading about, about HIV and then I learned about biofeedback after that. So I don't know. My first company was a medical device company, basically glucose monitoring for people with type one diabetes.
And I don't know if that technology would have benefited from HIV per se because it was for glucose monitoring. But I guess the second business we built was more of a digital health platform for people with diabetes to kind of get their glucose data analyzed through early machine learning analysis and giving them feedback on trends and how their glucose is behaving and predicting their glucose behavior. So we built this kind of a tool for people. And I think in that tool, actually, I think at least real time HRV could have contributed to the accuracy of these algorithms. But back then, no one had real time HIV. It was just, you know, it only came after. And I think even now, the challenge still is that if you're, you know, if you have, let's say you have an Apple Watch and the quality of HR, the HR quality of HRV quality during the day and when you're moving, whatever skin color, how hairy your skin is, all those problems still persist. And that is definitely a challenge. I mean, aura, I guess, again, being a big fan since the beginning, aura is, like, more accurate. But then again, I'm not sure if they even still support, like, real time daytime HRV. I don't think so. And so it's just, like, still, I think our technology is still, in some way, still, like, challenged to deliver that real time HRV. Like, that's accurate. But I think once we get there, my, my guess is that that data will start, like, improving. Bunch of different accurate, you know, the accuracy of a bunch of different algorithms for glucose, you know, prediction for other, you know, maybe asthma attack prediction, other things that are all, like, because everything's like a nervous system related in one way or another. So I think that's just, like, still a challenge, that the technology isn't quite there yet, but I'm sure we'll get there in the coming five to ten years.
[00:32:45] Speaker A: Well, that leads kind of to my final question that I love to ask folks like yourself.
Let's go forward 510 years. Where are you at? Where's Merrill? Athenae Murrow at, sorry. Where do you see heart rate variability going now that you're in the weeds of this field and finding, like you said, the limitations of current technologies, which for us is frustration as well sometimes that we can't do what we really want to do yet, I just like to, as we're in this technical revolution with artificial intelligence, just sort of, as you look forward to the next five or ten years, where do you see things going? Where do you maybe even some aspirations of where you'd like to see us go with this incredible biomarker.
[00:33:37] Speaker B: Yeah, love the question. I mean, personally, I think kind of, like I alluded to already, I think that, like, once we have real time HRV measurement throughout the day, like 24 hours, once it's actually accurate and works, I think that's going to be a great game changer, because that's going to start helping us again feed into other algorithms, and it's going to improve the accuracy of a bunch of other predictions. AI is going to be able to process massive amounts of data really quickly and learn and be adapting to individual parameters and features. I think the combo is going to be beautiful because I think it's going to really create an opportunity for us to use HRB data as a predictive pAl or a predictive support system for people with kind of chronic illnesses and other conditions, or even just people who want to exercise and want to just improve their health and whatever, not necessarily just being sick or so, but I think even more valuable for people who are chronically ill and who are really looking to kind of heal and get better. So I think in that sense, HRV, I guess, yeah, that's one perspective. But the other thing that I would say is that I'm absolutely certain that once we go deeper into the kind of HRV subcategories and what are the different bandwidths and different ways of analyzing the data, I'm sure we will understand and learn that it predicts many, many other things that we don't fully understand. I think I've heard people talk about hypothesis on what it could predict and what kind of information does it actually already have inside of it. But we are not quite able to fully understand it or extract it. But I believe that there's a lot of information encoded into your heart rate and your heart rate variability, which is something which we can extract as we build larger models of analyzing data. Again, AI will be instrumental in this place. I'm excited. I'm excited for the future. And also at Merrill Health, how we're going to be using HRV and HRV biofeedback. We'll definitely go deeper and deeper, and just like, kind of, as technology develops even more, we'll be able to, like, even more accurately provide people with personalized feedback and personalized recommendations.
[00:35:54] Speaker A: Yeah, I share that optimism. I think we're going to, you know, even being in this work, you know, where resonance breathing and all this is still, like, relatively new for tracking it. You know, we don't have you know, I'm hitting up against these questions that I don't think five years ago you could have really asked in the same way because now you got your data set, we got our data set at optimal, you start to look at, okay, is the evening it was. When you're tired, does your low frequency, do you just not have access to the same levels of low frequency? What about the time domains in there? That's where AI think can really like, okay, you know, that high frequency and RMSSD kind of work together, but what's the small differences telling us? And those are the, I think the, the windows of opportunity that would probably drive a statician or a data analysis person. Absolutely bonkers. But, you know, so AI might really start to find just those minute things, you know, but you know, when you're dealing in milliseconds, you know, that's kind of what we're talking about. So I think it's a really exciting time that we're getting into here.
[00:37:17] Speaker B: Totally. And also one more thing. I guess the availability of daily ECG I think is going to be really important because PPG has its challenges without even going into all of that. But I think the more we have ECG level data available on a daily basis, on a 24 hours basis, easily for people, it's going to make things even way more accurate than better.
[00:37:42] Speaker A: I love it. Well, hey, I appreciate you. I appreciate this integrative model.
I hope that this episode, if you're looking for some mental health folks out there that getting you on their radar, hopefully maybe some folks reaching out because that model I think is going to be really exciting both for our audience who are looking for resources and also maybe some providers who are looking for frustrated with the lack of integration in mental health. So we'll put information links. I've got the great article up here so we'll definitely get those in the show notes as well. But I thank you for your work. I'm really excited. We got to keep in touch because I'm really excited for your model and love that we can get the word out here at the heart rate variability podcast.
[00:38:33] Speaker B: Thanks so much, Matt. Really appreciate it. Thanks for having me. And yeah, for people, please reach out and yeah, thanks again for all your work. Appreciate it.
[00:38:41] Speaker A: Awesome. And as always, you can find show notes, everything else,
[email protected]. we will see everybody next week. Thanks so much.
[00:38:50] Speaker B: Bye.
