So which heart rate monitors should scientists with no grant for research test & write a paper about it?

Last Updated on August 27, 2023 by pg@petergamma.org

There are many open questions regarding the accuracy of consumer grade heart rate monitors. To increase the quality of these studies, we suggest to compare only the ones which are said to be the most accurate ones and write a paper about it, and that is:

1. Polar H10

which is eventually currently the most accurate HRM chest strap.

Rob ter Horsts number one recommendation

2. the Apple Watch SE 2022

which is eventually currently the most accurate low-cost high-quality optical heart rate monitor, which is number one recommended by Rob ter Horst.

3. The Cyton 3 channel ECG with HeartPy

which is eventually the most accurate low-cost high-quality 3 channel ECG device with a software which can handle with very noisy ECG signals.

4. The protocol used by the cardiologists of the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio on the treadmill extended to maximal speed:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6732081/

It a simple protocol which has been critizised by DC Rainmaker not to be a real-world szenario. But the advantage is that it can easily be repeated, what is not possible with DC Rainmaker and Rob ter Hosts testing protocols, since they do not publish those. In previous papers, a big diversity of protocols where used which, and the data of different papers cannot be compared to each other:

90.3 Summary of the testing protocols of different studies

We do not know if it worth writing a paper about these HRMs right now. We do not know if the Apple Watch SE 2020 and the Polar H10 are much more accurate than the Apple Watch III and the Polar H7 which was tested in the above paper. But for engineering students it is eventually worth to further test the Cyton 3 channel ECG with for instance HeartPy on the treadmill protocol described above to see, if we get a higher accuracy with it than with a Polar H10 and an Apple Watch SE2020. According to the specifications of the device, this should be possible.

The Cyton 3 channel ECG meets the requirements to be a gold standard device for HRM measurements, but not the other two HRMs. If it is possible to show that it is more accurate for instance on a treadmill than the other two HRMs, it could be a device with good acceptance among cardiologists and physiologists. And it could also be a generally accepted reference device to bring accuracy studies of consumer grade HRMs further.

We have a lot of accuracy testers of consumer grade heart rate monitors, but we have only little numerical and statistical data, and we do not have a clear standard how the accuracy of consumer grade HRMs should be tested.