Vitals
A Fitbit-powered dashboard that tracks what a working day does to your body. The metrics athletes obsess over, applied to a clinical shift instead.
We measure heart rate and recovery the moment we put on trainers. Nobody asks what a 13-hour night shift does to the same numbers. I wanted to find out.
What it is
Vitals is a personal dashboard that reads my Fitbit data throughout a working day and shows me what the shift is doing to my body — heart rate, HRV, stress load, recovery — in real time.
The idea is simple: sport medicine has spent decades building frameworks for tracking physiological load during exercise. Nobody applies those same frameworks to the job. A clinical shift is physically and cognitively demanding in measurable ways. Vitals is an attempt to measure them.
What I built
A dashboard that pulls data from my Fitbit Air through the Google Health API and visualises it across a shift.
- Real-time heart rate tracking throughout the working day
- HRV and stress load metrics — the same data endurance athletes use to track training load
- Shift-level summaries: peak load, recovery windows, comparison across shifts
- Built in Swift, running on my own hardware
Why I built it
The gap that bothered me: elite athletes know their physiological state in real time. They track load, flag overtraining, and build in recovery. Doctors do 13-hour nights, sometimes back-to-back, with no equivalent framework at all.
I'm not trying to solve fatigue in medicine — that's a systems problem and a much bigger fight. But I was curious what the data actually looked like on a clinical shift. Does a labour ward emergency at 3am show up in the HRV the same way a 5km tempo run does? I wanted to find out.
Stack
Swift, the Google Health API for Fitbit data access, and a Fitbit Air as the sensor.
It's a personal project — private repo, personal hardware, no public deployment. Still being built.
Would something like this be useful to you?
If you work clinical shifts and want to understand what they're doing to your body, I'd love to hear from you. Still building — but happy to talk it through and share early access.
Get in touch