The Polar H10, the Apple watch Ultra, do it yourself 3 lead ECG, do it yourself optical heart rate monitor – or a multi-sensor device of all?

Last Updated on August 1, 2023 by pg@petergamma.org

We have reviewed many heart rate monitors in our journal, and many YouTube video makers made great contributions to this topic, as for instance how to stream data from the Apple watch into Home Assistant, and from there to InfluxDB and viszualise data in Grafana.

We can use the Polar H10 chest strap with Balena Health and sync it to Balena Home Assistant, YouTube video maker welcome to make a video about it.

On the other hand, there are different options available to build ECG devices by ourselves, as for instance a 3 lead ECG device with OpenBCI and the open source heart rate toolbox HeartPy.

There are also instruction available for instance from How To Electronics how to build an optical heart rate monitor device by ourselves, and HeartPy offers options to remove noise from those. With these tools it is possible to build multi-sensor devices by ourselves, and compare for instance the accuracy of an Apple watch to a 3 lead ECG device to an optical heart rate monitor which we have built by ourselves to find out, which devices fits best for our own special application.