Which biometric signals matter in behavioral health, and why?
Five families of signals carry most of the value: sleep (duration, stages, timing), resting heart rate, heart-rate variability, respiratory rate, and stress/activity load. Each is measured nightly by consumer wearables, and each has published research connecting it to the states behavioral-health clinicians care about — always interpreted against the individual's own baseline.
Sleep is the richest signal: total duration, deep and REM proportions, and — often underrated — timing. A bedtime drifting later night after night is a routine dissolving, visible in data before anyone says it out loud. Resting heart rate is a slow-moving vital: sustained elevation above a person's own normal accompanies physiological stress, illness, substances, and certain medications.
Heart-rate variability reflects autonomic balance; suppressed HRV relative to one's own baseline tracks strain and poor recovery. Respiratory rate is stable within a person, which makes departures notable. Stress and activity metrics — vendor-computed load scores, steps, movement — sketch the shape of a day: engagement or withdrawal, agitation or flatness.
None of these numbers means anything in isolation, and none of them diagnoses anything. Their value is comparative (this person, against this person's history) and conversational — they tell a clinician where to look and what to ask. That is the entire design stance of NavixPulse: signals in, questions out.
- Why compare wearable data to personal baselines instead of population norms?
- Can wearable data help behavioral health treatment?
- Which wearables work best for a treatment program?
NavixPulse is decision support for licensed professionals — questions, never verdicts, never a diagnosis. Read why we're building it or begin — it's self-serve.