Marco Altini
  • Home
  • Research & Publications
  • Apps & Projects
  • Blog

PhD defense Julia Pietilä

16/2/2020

 
I was invited to Tampere university of technology for Julia Pietilä’s PhD defense where I had the honor to act as the “opponent”, according to Finnish protocol.

Julia did great work on HRV data and its relation to physical activity, sleep, alcohol intake and more (a few extra words on her work can be found below, while the full text of the thesis is available here).

Special thanks to Ilkka Korhonen, who is (among other things) CTO at Firstbeat, a company I’ve always admired for the sound scientific approach. I’m grateful for the invitation and the opportunity to talk about my work and learn more about the research being done here. I really had a great time and it is always nice to find like minded people who understand the value of collaboration and research even when working in a similar business or addressing the same market.

Here is a very brief overview of the thesis:
In this thesis, a very large dataset comprising thousand of individuals and multiple days of data per individual were used to analyse the relationship between resting physiological parameters such as HRV and population level parameters (age, BMI, etc.) as well as acute stressors such as alcohol intake and physical activity. In particular, the thesis focused on methodological aspects linked to the use of large datasets collected in unsupervised conditions, and provides useful insights on various aspects. Most notably, on the difficulty of determining PA levels in relative and absolute manners, as well as on the impact of alcohol intake and PA on HRV and sleep quality. 

The work builds incrementally on what is known from smaller studies, validating the use of data collected in unconstrained free living settings for the analysis of PA, alcohol intake and sleep and then takes this further by exploring aspects that could hardly be investigated in regular clinical or more controlled studies.

I believe an important contribution here is the analysis of the relation between acute bouts of PA, overall fitness or habitual PA, and HRV as a marker of both parasympathetic activity in response to acute stressors (in relative terms) but also as a marker of health and potentially of fitness. Another important contribution is certainly the analysis of the difference in terms of acute responses depending on individual characteristics, for example recovery time in terms of HRV in response to alcohol intake or PA, and how these aspects can depend on a person’s age or BMI. These are all aspects very difficult to analyse or extrapolate from published literature given the small sample size or limited data. 

This work is of great relevance at this time, as there seem to be a gap between the large amounts of data collected by digital health companies and the methods and studies carried out in controlled research settings where often just a few subjects take part in such studies.​
Picture

Comments are closed.

    Marco ALtini

    Founder of HRV4Training, Advisor @Oura , Guest Lecturer @VUamsterdam , Editor @ieeepervasive. PhD Data Science, 2x MSc: Sport Science, Computer Science Engineering. Runner

    Archives

    December 2022
    August 2022
    June 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    November 2019
    October 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    November 2018
    October 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    June 2017
    December 2016
    July 2016
    March 2016
    September 2015
    August 2015
    May 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013

    RSS Feed

  • Home
  • Research & Publications
  • Apps & Projects
  • Blog