Spotify Reportedly Wanting to Match Music to Your Heart Rate

If you have a hard time finding the right music to fit the current mood you’re in, Spotify is said to want to fix that. According to The Guardian, the music streaming service is working on a feature that will use sensor’s on the listener’s body or in their smartphone to measure their heart beat and find music that matches it.

In fact, Spotify could start creeping into the sleep monitoring business, as Spotify product manager Donovan Sung says that using motion, heart rate and temperature data, the company could start to monitor sleep patterns and moods throughout the day.

With that, Spotify wants to automatically select playlists based on a listener’s current mood and movement status. This means that if you’re exercising and moving around a lot with a fast heart beat, Spotify will play fast-paced music. However, if you’re lying down trying to get some rest, Spotify will recommend soothing music to listen to.

Sung says that “the more we know about you, the better the [recommendation] engine can be.” This is just slightly creepy, but as anyone knows, giving up your personal data is the only way to get personalized recommendations automatically without user interaction, and it can make for a better-quality product if that’s what consumers are looking for.

Of course, this is only a concept right now, and it might be a while until we see something like this make its way to the public, but as with any recommendation engine, Spotify’s concept uses algorithms mixed with some human editing in order to deliver the most appropriate music for any occasion.

We’re definitely interested in seeing how Spotify will implement different technologies in order to read heart rates and such, but it’s possible that the service will partner with heart rate monitor companies, and possibly even fitness app developers as well.