Last Updated on January 9, 2023 by pg@petergamma.org
To develop new open source heart rate monitors from scratch is time consuming. An alternative is for instance to take a consumer grade sports sensor which is highly accurate, and validate it on a regular basis in a good scientific journal.
The Polar OH1 was promising at the beginning. There was a validation paper in PLOS ONE. But are PLOS ONE papers not papers, of which we expect, that there will be sooner or later better papers than a PLOS ONE papers?
But the contrary happened with Polar sensors. The Verity Sense had a longer battery life than the Polar OH1. But then Polar also changed the running time of the Verity Sense by firmware update. Such new models and fimware updates make those unattracitve for scientific validation studies.
If the community of scientific accuracy validators focuses on one or two highly accurate devices, and validates those on a regular basis, this is also a solution which could win.
A candidate for this are also Apple watches. Rob ter Horst and Dr. Milind Desai have already shown that Apple watches are highly accurate. But Polar sensors still are ahead for software tools to access heart rate data, for instance with the Polar Sensor Logger App and the Polar SDK.
Apple watches are newer, but the software for it seems not as far developed as for instance for Garmin watches or Polar watches with apps like Polar sensor logger app, a training tracker and Max Candocia fit to .csv Python scripts. Some of those work also with Apple watches. But to get for instance R-R peak data and P-P data is as far as we know the easiest with the Polar Sensor logger app, which is not available for Apple watches.
We do know little about Apple watches, eventually comparable tools are aready available for Apple watches. But we have not studied those yet.
But we still miss an optical heart rate monitor which can be recommended for scientific studies, is highly accurate and is good validated in a scientific journal. Dr Desai did this with the Apple watch 3. We can find the device eventually on ebay. If no one develops such devices or is interested in the development on these devices, the best devices can be found on ebay, also in the future.