Will optical sports watches ever be as accurate as ECG devices?

Last Updated on February 2, 2023 by pg@petergamma.org

We strongly doubt about this. 3 lead ECG devices which 3 channels which are amplfied independent from each other are the gold standard for HR measurement for cardiologists.

ECG signals have sharp peaks, which can be easily detected by peak detection algorithms. PPG watches have round peaks. The open source Python toolbox HeartPy can remove noise in PPG signals. But will this ever be possible as good as in ECG signals? We strongly doubt about this.

We could nowhere find any evidence that scientists interested in highly accurate heart rate monitors work on the development of PPG devices for this purpose.

We did not study the literature about this topic in detail. But we are interested in it since several years, and we could not find any evidence about it.