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Bengaluru Engineer Builds 'Stress Leaderboard' by Linking Whoop Heart Rate to Calendar

Reverse-engineered per-minute Whoop data matched heart-rate spikes to meetings, raising privacy and interpretation concerns.

Overview

  • Pankaj, a Bengaluru software engineer, said in early June that he used Fable to pull minute-by-minute heart-rate data from his Whoop and programmatically matched spikes to calendar events and attendees.
  • His analysis produced a personal "leaderboard" ranking coworkers by how often their meetings coincided with his heart-rate spikes and the posts and screenshots went viral with millions of views and tens of thousands of likes.
  • Shared images showed the Whoop on his wrist plus blurred code, charts and rankings that illustrated the technical setup and his method of pairing biometric data with meeting attendee lists.
  • Reporters and commenters warned that heart-rate spikes can be caused by many non-meeting factors such as activity, food, caffeine and time of day and said the experiment is not a clinical measure of workplace stress.
  • Readers suggested possible commercial uses as workplace analytics but there have been no reported responses from Whoop or Pankaj’s employer and coverage so far treats the episode as a novel personal experiment rather than a formal product.