Features of a sleep tracking app that you would recommend to your friends
Sleep tracking apps can help you understand your sleep habits without the need for paid apps or expensive wearables.
problem solved
Mia Beam was used to going to the gym. The 24-year-old former Division I basketball player dribbled and jumped better than most people in the country. Then one day last November, she struggled to take a deep breath.
Emergency room doctors diagnosed her with pleurisy, an inflammation of the tissue that separates the lungs from the chest wall. After taking anti-inflammatory drugs, she began to feel better. But after a few days, her symptoms worsened. Sweat soaked her sheets. It wasn’t the coronavirus. Is it possible that it was a virus infection?
“I had to take a bath every morning because I was freezing,” the Louisville, Kentucky, student said on a video call. “I couldn’t lie down and had to sleep in a certain elevated position because I couldn’t breathe properly when I lay down.” Her heart rate rose to 130 to 140 seconds just by sitting on the couch. Her WHOOP bracelet, a wearable device that tracks vital signs, sleep patterns, and athletic performance metrics, alerted her to how hard her body was being worked without exercise.
Medical providers had a hard time diagnosing her. Blood tests, a CT scan, and an echocardiogram ultimately revealed that she had pericarditis, which progressed to cardiac tamponade. Cardiac tamponade is a condition in which swelling and irritation around the heart cause fluid to build up and stop normal blood flow.
Doctors removed 871 milliliters of fluid from her heart during surgery and said she would have died within 24 to 48 hours. Her mother, Jamie Beam, said: “Her left lung had collapsed, her left ventricle had collapsed, and it had entered the right side of her heart.”
Mia Beam believes a WHOOP bracelet saved her life.
WHOOP tracks traditional metrics like heart rate, blood oxygen, and skin temperature and sends that information to an app on your phone. It also monitors your health across categories such as sleep.
Another such category is “tension.” It looks at both cardiovascular and muscular loads and how exercise, anxiety and other factors affect health. Over the past two weeks, Beam’s heart rate has increased to between 15 and 16 out of 21 on the resting stress scale. That 15-16 previously appeared on her only after training, such as basketball games.
It’s great that new technology saves lives, but it’s not the be-all and end-all when it comes to health and medicine. Medical experts say regular visits to your primary care physician remain the standard recommendation for staying healthy. But wearable technology devices like WHOOP, Oura Ring, and even the Apple Watch can be additional tools in your toolbox.
“Medical Miracle”
Beam received WHOOP as a gift about a year ago. She was aiming for high tension numbers during her workouts, but when it showed her resting tension was very high, she thought the bracelet might have malfunctioned.
Doctors are now monitoring Beam closely and he is taking medication to prevent this from happening again. Taking it easy was tough for the self-proclaimed “gym rat.”
“I try to be really intentional about play activities and what I’m doing and listen to my body,” she says. “But I’m at a stage in my life where I never thought I’d be in this situation.” She retired from basketball in the spring of 2025, but worried she would have pushed herself too hard had she still played. She played last year despite suffering facial fractures.
Beam tries not to focus too much on the WHOOP numbers, although they are fascinating.
“At first I was obsessed with it, and if I thought something was wrong I would panic,” she says. “But right now, I think it’s more of a monitoring thing.”
“It’s important in no case to look at your data as a report card or a referendum on whether or not you’re doing well,” says John Sullivan, chief marketing officer at WHOOP. “Instead of just being growth-oriented and trying to say whatever the data tells us today, we’re going to use the data to inform decisions about how to bend the curve tomorrow.”
He said the company hears from users every week who say the product helped them discover symptoms they otherwise wouldn’t have noticed, so they built an acceptance system for people to share their stories and give the company permission to talk about it. He discovered his own risk for heart disease through the company’s advanced research efforts.
It’s easy to see why the entire Beam family has started tracking their health through wearables since Mia’s ordeal. We’re seeing testimonials on social media about many other early detection companies, including full-body MRI and extensive blood testing from Prenuvo and Function. While it’s best to see the whole story as just one story, there’s no denying the benefits that technology like this can offer.
“It’s kind of a medical miracle that she’s walking around so healthy,” Jamie Beam says. “I really appreciate it.”
