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

Swaroop Panda

Published 2025 in arXiv.org

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.

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