Wy did no ECG device manufacturer yet beat the 90 USD Polar H10 chest strap which is known to be the gold standard for intense activities with strong body movements?

Last Updated on July 23, 2023 by pg@petergamma.org

Why do very expensive ECG devices not beat the Polar H10 in this discipline?

The problem is not a hardware problem.The detailed technical specifications of the Polar H10 chest strap are unknown. But we suppose it has a A/D conversion rate between 10 and 24 bit, 1 channel, 1 lead and 2 – 3 electrodes. The specifications for for instnce the the OpenBCI Cyton are listed in this table:

90.02 Research & medical grade ECG devices which some of those were used to study the accuracy of consumer grade HRMs in different papers

They can compete with the best medical and research grade ECG devices on the market. The problem is not a hardware problem, but a software problem. In this table we can also that different manufacturers offer different methods to remove ECG motion artifacts, but nobody has shown that that they win against the Polar H10, altough these devices are much more expensive.

Software solutions which are not tested against the Polar H10 are for instance HeartPy:

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=OOhuA6gAAAAJ&hl=de&oi=sra

which can be used to for regular and very noisy ECG data. And the following Sensors papers offers a comparison of motion artefact reduction methods and the implementation of adaptive motion artefact reduction in wearable ECG devices:

https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/20/5/1468

These options should be tested to beat the Polar H10 as far as accuracy is concerned.