Health Update: Health Update: WHOOP bracelet saves 24-year-old with rare heart condition – What Experts Say– What Experts Say.
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Problem Solved
Mia Beam was used to going to the gym. A former Division I basketball player, the 24-year-old dribbled and jumped better than most of the country. Then, one day last November, she struggled to take a deep breath.
An emergency room doctor diagnosed her with pleurisy, or inflammation of the tissue separating lungs from the chest wall. She started feeling better after taking anti-inflammatory medication. But her symptoms worsened days later. Sweat soaked her sheets. It wasn’t COVID; could it have been a viral infection?
“I would have to get in the bath every morning because I was freezing,” the Louisville, Kentucky, student says over a video call. “I couldn’t lay flat because I couldn’t breathe very well when I was laying flat, so I had to sleep kind of elevated.” Her heart rate surged into the 130s and 140s, even just sitting on the couch. Her WHOOP bracelet, a wearable device that tracks vital signs, sleep patterns and exercise performance metrics, warned her how hard her body was working without exercise.
Medical providers struggled to diagnose her. Bloodwork, a CT scan and an echocardiogram ultimately revealed she had pericarditis that progressed to cardiac tamponade: swelling and irritation around the heart that caused fluid to build up and stop normal blood flow.
Doctors drained 871 milliliters of fluid off her heart in surgery and said she would have died within 24 to 48 hours. “Her left lung was collapsed,” her mother Jamie Beam says, “her left ventricle was collapsed, and it was seeping into the right part of her heart.”
Mia Beam credits her WHOOP bracelet with saving her life.
WHOOP tracks traditional metrics like heart rate, blood oxygen and skin temperature and sends the info to an app on your phone. It also monitors your health across categories like sleep.
One other such category is “strain,” that looks at both cardiovascular and muscular load and how exercise, anxiety and other factors impact your health. Over the course of those two weeks, Beam’s heart rate rose to a 15-16 out of 21 on the strain scale at rest. That 15-16 only appeared previously for her after a workout like a basketball game.
It’s great when new technology can be life saving, but it’s not the be-all, end-all when it comes to health and medicine. Regular visits with your primary care doctor remain the standard recommendation for staying on top of your health, according to medical experts. But wearable tech devices, such as the WHOOP, Oura Ring or even Apple Watch, can be an extra tool in your toolbox.
‘A medical miracle’
Beam received her WHOOP as a gift about a year ago. She aimed to get her strain numbers high during workouts and thought the bracelet might’ve been glitching when it showed her resting strain so high.
Doctors closely monitor Beam today, and she takes medication to ensure this doesn’t happen again. It’s been tough on the self-described “gym rat” to take it easy.
“I’m trying to be really intentional about play activity and what I’m doing and just listening to my body,” she says, “but I’m in a phase of my life that I never thought I’d be in.” She retired from basketball in spring 2025 and worried if she were still playing, she would’ve pushed herself too hard. She even played through a facial fracture last year.
Beam is trying to not focus on her WHOOP numbers too much, as tempting as it is.
“In the beginning I was obsessed with it, and if anything looked wrong, I was freaking out,” she says. “But now I’m kind of, like, it’s more of a monitoring thing.”
“It’s important to not look at your data in all cases, all the time as a report card or a referendum on whether you’re living successfully or not,” says John Sullivan, chief marketing officer at WHOOP, “versus trying to just be growth-oriented and say whatever the data is telling me today, I’ll use it to inform decisions about how to bend the curve tomorrow.”
He says that the company hears from users weekly that the product has led them to discover conditions they were otherwise unaware of, so much so they built an intake system for people to share their stories and give the company permission to talk about them. He discovered his own risk for heart disease through the company’s advanced lab work.
It’s easy to see why the Beam family all started tracking their health through the wearables since Mia’s ordeal. You see testimonials across social media regarding many other early detection companies, like full-body MRIs and extensive bloodwork from Prenuvo and Function. While it’s best to take every story as just that – one story – there’s no denying the benefits such technology can offer.
“She’s like a medical miracle walking around being so healthy,” Jamie Beam says. “We’re just so thankful.”