Identifying Stressful Colleagues with AI and Heart Rate Monitoring
A developer wanted to find out which colleagues caused him the most stress at work. He accomplished this using AI, a health tracker, and some custom code. Now he has a leaderboard of the biggest troublemakers.
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A developer wanted to find out which colleagues caused him the most stress at work. He accomplished this using AI, a health tracker, and some custom code. Now he has a leaderboard of the biggest troublemakers.
Workplace stress can have many causes. Researchers recently conducted an analysis of over 500 studies to identify the biggest sources of disruption in the work environment. In a much smaller—and perhaps less serious—scope, developer Pankaj Tanwar sought to identify stress factors in his workplace. Specifically, he wanted to find out which colleagues stressed him the most.
A Leaderboard for the Most Stressful Colleagues
To achieve this, he combined several techniques in a project. First, he modified his Whoop band. This allowed the fitness tracker to provide minute-by-minute data on the developer's heart rate. Tanwar then compared the times of his heart rate fluctuations with his work calendar using Claude Fable 5 and some custom code.
The idea behind this: Each meeting has specific participants. If Tanwar's heart rate increases during a meeting, he assumes he was annoyed by someone present. By overlapping the participants across numerous meetings, a leaderboard of the most annoying colleagues should emerge.
Tanwar shared the results on X, wisely censoring the names of the meetings and not posting any colleagues' names. Instead, he used their job descriptions and positions in the team for identification. According to the analysis, Tanwar's heart rate primarily spiked in meetings where a “pm_growth,” or Growth Product Manager, was present. This earned them the title of “main suspect” for Tanwar's stress levels.
Other colleagues, such as another developer and a “team_1_person,” landed in second and third place. They are considered “mild stressors” and only slightly increase his heart rate. In fact, the data also showed that Tanwar could relax in the presence of some colleagues. A “senior_dev” ranked far behind all stress factors.
As Android Authority emphasizes, this is more of a fun project than hard facts. After all, Tanwar's heart rate could have risen for other reasons during the meeting. Additionally, a person could be present in each of the meetings that stressed the developer and say nothing. Nevertheless, the data would likely assign them a high stress value.
Better Ways to Manage Workplace Stress
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