How a Whoop Fitness Tracker Identifies Unpopular Colleagues

September 13, 2026, 3:02 pm | Read time: 2 minutes

Almost every office has them, and there’s hardly any escape: unpleasant colleagues. Everyone knows a coworker or two to avoid or who simply annoys during the 40 hours spent together each week. This can literally get your pulse racing, as one user of a Whoop fitness tracker humorously discovered.

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As reported by “Android Authority,” a Whoop fitness tracker user, Pankaj Tanwar, came up with the quirky idea of combining his wearable’s health data with his work calendar and meeting participants. He focused on changes in his heart rate, stress results, and the overall impact of these factors over a certain period for his project.

In this way, Tanwar created a system that identified connections between certain colleagues and a sudden increase in heart rate. Based on his findings, he was able to create a ranking of employees, organizing them by how much stress they caused in meetings.

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Tanwar shared his humorous experiment on X (formerly Twitter), taking care to hide the names of the human stress factors. He also explained that he used the new Fable model from Claude and custom-written code for this purpose.

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He also had to reconfigure his Whoop fitness tracker system to provide much more detailed heart rate data than is typically available. He then compared the data with calendar entries and participants.

Besides clear “winners” in the ranking, Tanwar also found colleagues whose results were largely neutral. Additionally, there were people who even produced noticeably calmer results–apparently, they are individuals who reduce Tanwar’s stress. There is no exact explanation for this, but one might speculate about mutual sympathies.

Amusing, but Not Perfect

The stress ranking of unpleasant colleagues may be entertaining, but it is far from perfect. After all, there can be multiple reasons for a temporarily elevated heart rate. A bit of hustle, a cup of coffee, or a sweet snack can already cause it. Health data without further context cannot capture the overall situation a person was in at a specific time.

This article is a machine translation of the original German version of TECHBOOK and has been reviewed for accuracy and quality by a native speaker. For feedback, please contact us at info@techbook.de.