Wedding Day Heart Rate

When times are bad it is important to look back and appreciate when times were good. I mean damn perfect! Nothing could have been better than my wedding last June to my amazing wife Melissa.

Some people open up beautiful leather bound wedding albums to reminisce….I look at my custom data visualization of my heart beat. To each their own OK!

Background

I wore my Apple Watch Series 4 the entire day of my wedding. I made sure to have an active workout session running the entire time so I would get a decent sample rate of my HR of 1 per minute. Otherwise the Apple Watch will only record HR once every 15 minutes. After the wedding, I exported the HR readings to CSV with timestamps with a Shortcuts script.

I then went in and manually added activity labels, going through the data hour by hour. Overlaying a moving average regression line I identified the peaks manually and then compared those times to our wedding pictures (Thankfully I had all the RAW digitals).

It was so neat how all the peaks in HR corresponded to the biggest events of the wedding! I then wrote some messy Python and used the Bokeh Plot library to make this interactive timeline of my wedding day. If you scroll over the data points you will see the time, my HR, and the event during that time. If you scroll over one of the peaks an image from the wedding pops up.