Life is more than a series of numbers, but these days it doesn’t always feel that way. We live in the age of wearable technology, health tracking and obsessive optimisation.
Armed with just a few discreet gizmos, a willing human being can practically turn themselves into a sentient spreadsheet.
We can monitor – by the hour – our blood oxygen, respiratory rate, glucose levels, REM sleep, skin temperature, heart rate variability, body composition and many other biomarkers.
You can track your diet, your mood, your menstrual cycle, even your bowel movements if you really want to.
The idea, of course, is that with all of this data at our fingertips we’ll fine-tune our existence and extend it. But how do you make it make sense?
How can we glean genuine health insights without hours of computation and admin? Because aside from a few bored billionaires, surely there aren’t many of us who think we’ll excel as a walking Excel spreadsheet?
Some good news, then, from researchers at Northwestern University, in the US. In 2025, they found a way to combine two frequently measured health metrics in a way that tells us something deeper about everyday fitness and long-term health risks.
Daily heart rate per step (or DHRPS) is a simple calculation: you take your average daily heart rate and divide it by the average number of steps you take.
Yes, you’ll need to be continuously monitoring both measurements with a health tracker like an Apple Watch or Fitbit (the latter was used in the study), but the counting is done for you.
Then it’s a two-second sum that tells you something real about your cardiovascular health.
“We found out that your [DHRPS measurement] actually correlates better with type 2 diabetes, heart failure, myocardial infarction and heart attack,” says Flynn Chen, lead author of the paper. “And it’s much better than just heart rate or step count alone.”
How to improve your score
Here’s how it works. Let’s say your average heart rate is 80 beats per minute this month and you take an average 6,000 steps per day. That means your DHRPS score is 0.01333.
Now, let’s say you improve your step count next month and do an average 10,000 steps per day. Then your DHRPS would have improved to 0.008. In this metric, lower is better.
In the study, Chen and his colleagues monitored over 7,000 Fitbit users across five years, who collectively took more than 50 billion steps during the study period.
Researchers divided them into three groups based on their DHRPS score: low (0.0081 or less), medium (over 0.0081, but lower than 0.0147) and high (0.0147 or above).
The simplest way to improve or lower your score is to increase the number of steps you’re taking, Chen says.
“We know that step count per day is an independent risk factor for cardiovascular disease and mortality through a lot of established studies,” he says.
“What we’re also discovering through our metric is that heart rate with respect to the number of steps is potentially a stronger independent risk factor for cardiovascular disease than just steps alone.
“When you increase the number of steps, you’re not only meeting the goal of 10,000 steps per day, you’re also – at the same time – diluting our measure. You’re lowering two factors by just doing one thing.”
Chen says that you need at least a week’s worth of reliable data from your smart watch or tracker to get a meaningful DHRPS score.
The future of heart rate per step
Since the research was published, the health tracking community has already begun using it – and that could lead to more findings as researchers collect more data.
“One of the things that’s really important is that our metric correlates with VO2 max in a small subset of patients,” Chen says.
That’s significant because VO2 max, which is a measure of the maximum amount of oxygen your body can use during exercise, can tell you a lot about your aerobic fitness and metabolic health.
The problem is that VO2 max is a tricky score to measure and usually involves a treadmill stress test, which has limited availability.
If DHRPS proves to be a good proxy for VO2 max, it could be another way to make revealing health data more accessible for all of us. No spreadsheets required.
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