My Homepage Has a Pulse
A developer has integrated real-time heart rate data from their Garmin wearable onto their personal homepage to create a 'pulse' indicator. The project reflects a desire to move away from abstract 'online' status indicators toward more personal, physiological representations of presence.
Why it matters
This highlights the intersection of personal health data, wearable technology, and the evolving philosophy of digital identity and presence on the web.
There is a small red heart on my homepage now that beats. The number next to it is my actual heart rate, and the heart pulses at that frequency: 48 bpm means one thump every 1.25 seconds, 80 bpm means one every 0.75. I wrote this up because I wanted to, and because the design ended up containing more interesting decisions than I expected.
I wear a Garmin Descent Mk3i , 43 mm, carbon gray DLC titanium. I bought it as my primary dive computer, alongside my Shearwater Perdix 2, because you need redundancy in technical diving and overhead environments like caves and wrecks. If a computer dies at 75 m inside a cave, you can’t just surface and charge it. Cave divers have backups for their backups. Since April 2025 it has been on 400+ dives with me, including to 100 m.
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