Look into your Heart -- Prototypes for a Speculative Design Exploration of Personal Heart Rate Visualization

TL;DR

This paper explores innovative visualization prototypes for personal heart rate data, aiming to reveal complex temporal patterns and enhance interpretability through a systematic, speculative design approach.

Contribution

It introduces five novel visualization prototypes for heart rate data, evaluated systematically using synthetic datasets and assessment scales, revealing design tensions and expanding the visualization design space.

Findings

Different visualization strategies reveal distinct aspects of heart rate patterns.

Evaluation uncovers recurring design tensions in visualizing physiological data.

The work provides a speculative map of the personal heart rate visualization design space.

Abstract

Personal heart rate data from wearable devices contains rich information, yet current visualizations primarily focus on simple metrics, leaving complex temporal patterns largely unexplored. We present a speculative exploration of personal heart rate visualization possibilities through five prototype approaches derived from established visualization literature: pattern/variability heatmaps, recurrence plots, spectrograms, T-SNE, and Poincar\'e plots. Using physiologically-informed synthetic datasets generated through large language models, we systematically explore how different visualization strategies might reveal distinct aspects of heart rate patterns across temporal scales and analytical complexity. We evaluate these prototypes using established visualization assessment scales from multiple literacy perspectives, then conduct reflective analysis on both the evaluation and the design of the prototypes. Our iterative process reveals recurring design tensions in visualizing complex physiological data. This work offers a speculative map of the personal heart rate visualization design space, providing insights into making heart rate data more visually accessible and meaningful.