After completing a meditation, you'll see a summary of how your body responded. This analysis is based on changes in your heart patterns over the course of the session.
These changes are measured by the ECG (electrocardiogram) sensors on the top of the Core device. An ECG is a measure of the electrical activity of your heart: with each heartbeat, an electrical impulse (or wave) travels through your heart, causing the muscle to squeeze and pump blood. The metal sensors on top of Core are highly sensitive and can track subtle changes in your heart rhythms via the electrical current that passes through your hands with every heartbeat.
Core takes this data and uses it to calculate your Heart Rate Variability, or HRV. This is a leading indicator of your general wellness and how your body responds to stressful situations. You can read more about HRV in this article.
Core then uses your HRV, along with other factors — including your meditation history and your typical baseline measurements — to characterize your physical state in two main ways: Calm and Focus. Calm represents how much of the meditation you spent in a state of rest, with your parasympathetic nervous system (”rest-and-digest”) highly activated. Focus also involves the activation of this system, but is also characterized by your respiratory, cardio-vascular and autonomic nervous coming into sync and working together; it’s often experienced as a balanced, energized mental state.
You can read more about Calm and Focus, and the physiological factors that underlie them, in this article. Taken altogether, these metrics can provide a window into how your nervous system is responding to your meditation experience on a given day.
Because Core uses your previous meditation sessions to calculate baseline metrics for you, and uses these to generate your Calm and Focus scores each time, sharing your Core with others can lead to some skewed results. To prevent this from happening, check out some tips for sharing your Core with others.