Last Updated on November 21, 2023 by pg@petergamma.org
A paper in Nature Reviews Cardiology is entiteled:
The Apple Watch can detect atrial fibrillation: so what now?
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41569-019-0330-y
Similarly we asking the question:
Rob ter Horst tested 100 smartwatches – so what now?
Rob ter Horsts test help to find out relatively which are the most accurate smartwatches for instance. But did Rob ter Horsts tests trigger new validation papers which would open his smartwatches for new applications? We do not know of such papers.
Rob still only cites one paper funded by Polar:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31004219/
and ignores the other papers we reviewed:
- For whom is it helpful to know which are the most accurate watches, if we do not have scientific studies with numerical and statistical data which confirm Rob ter Horsts findings?
- And for whom is it helpful to have Rob’s results?
- Do private users have the tools to analyse their sports sensor data numerically and statistically? There are tools available for this. But are they widely used? We do not know anything about it.
- Rob’s data increases the quality of the reviews, but we still miss numerical and statical scientific papers about these devices which confirm Rob’s findings.
- And what about the other (clinical) scientists? Was it not worth for those to test newer optical heart rate monitors than the ones they have already tested?
- Did manufacturers before test the new optical heart rate sensors for clinical applications, and decided against those, since they are not as accurate as 3 lead ECG devices which are gold standard for HR measurements below about 15 km/h?
- Is it possible to further increase the accuracy of optical heart rate monitors? And if so, who makes investements in the further developement of optical heart rate monitors? The clinical scientists seem not to have done it to this date. At least not in the prize range of optical heart rate watches.
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