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TechRadar
David Nield

Someone hacked his Whoop to see which of his colleagues raised his stress levels the most and I need this immediately

Whoop MG worn on man's wrist on street.
  • This Whoop hack matches heart rate to meeting attendees
  • It can link coworkers with higher levels of stress
  • The unofficial hack was made with the help of Claude Fable 5 AI

We've seen several examples of people hacking their Whoop bands before (including recently), but nothing quite on this level: one enterprising user has hooked his Whoop up to his meetings schedule on Google Calendar, and can now work out which of his coworkers raise his stress levels the most.

Developer Pankaj Tanwar posted his custom-made setup on X, and it's clearly something a lot of other people are interested in — at the time of writing there are more than 10 million views registered on the post.

We don't get too much in the way of detail about how this was done, but Tanwar says he used the Claude Fable AI model to reverse engineer his Whoop and extract the heart rate data. That was then matched up with calendar meetings, and the colleagues attending.

"I now have a leaderboard and I think about it daily," says Tanwar, who has sensibly edited his screenshot so that we can't actually see which people get his blood boiling more than others. It's a really neat idea and a great example of a hardware and software hack that produces some genuinely interesting data.

More please

Of course this isn't an exact science — heart rate can vary for all kinds of reasons, including time of day and eating and drinking routines. It's possible that it's the subjects of the meetings that are getting Tanwar's heart rate spiking, rather than the coworkers that are sitting in there with him.

Still, it's a fun experiment, and even if the Whoop isn't correctly identifying the colleagues that cause the most stress, the data can be used to manage health and well-being during the working day, in and out of meetings.

It's something I'd love to have on my own fitness tracker: the sort of insight that these AI-enhanced trackers should be giving us. Which colleague annoys me the most? What parts of my commute are the most stressful? Which TV shows calm me down?

This is also more evidence for the increasingly capable AI models that we're all getting access to. Fable 5 has only just been released to the world at large, and is already being used to produce next-level apps and tools with just a few lines of prompting — see also these alternative Fitbit apps.

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