Rob ter Horst claims to study scientifically & systematically heart rate monitors, but are his device and tests helpful for other scientists?

Last Updated on August 20, 2023 by pg@petergamma.org

We only watched the first view seconds of this video, Which scientists watch all of his videos and whch scientists can Rob convince with his devices and tests? What does scientific mean? Working scientifically means being critical, questioning, specifying, starting with your own thinking, leading to comprehensible results and relying on scientific results.

  • But Rob ter Horst very often does not react on critisims, or only very superficial.
  • We repeatetely critisized him that he systematically ignores papers which are essential for a heart rate monitor accuracy testers.

Rob ter Horst does not publish his testing protocols which makes his tests not reproducible. For whom are test helpufl which cannot be reproduced? For him to get a lot of views on YouTube and the sport heart rate sellers? We discuess previously the requirements for a gold standart heart rate measurement device. Who is interested in devices which do not meet this requirements? Which scientists use devices, which always raise questions like: is this heart rate monitor accurate enough?

  • Rob uses a Polar H10 chest strap which does not meet the requirements to be a gold standard reference device for heart rate monitor devices.

We suppose that sooner or later a device will be available wich is more accurate than his Polar H10 chest strap. In the range without intense activities without strong body movements we already have such devices, and these are 3 lead ECG devices which meet the requirements to be a gold standard for heart rate measurements:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2720055/

A simple device such as a OpenBCI Cyton meets these requirements, but not the Polar H10. But we do not know of a manufacturer who has solved the problems of ECG motion artifacts with a 3 lead device if intense activities with strong body movements are investigated. Also Polar with his Polar H10 did not solve this problem. But developers can test candidate devices to see if those can solve this problem, since candidates are available. But this requires more than to write some reviews in a Sensors paper. Nobody reports to have had a break-through to solve this problem.