Future directions of accuracy studies of consumer grade heart rate monitors

Last Updated on August 23, 2023 by pg@petergamma.org

Are HRMs as the Polar H10 & the Apple watch Ultra helpful tools for scientific studies about heart rate accuracy? Until now, we did not find an answer to this question, which was satisfying for us personally. We think the next step to find answers to this topic would be to develop a 3 channel (or 3 lead) ECG device which can handle with noisy ECG signals and is more accurate than the Polar H10 chest strap. Is this not a topic which is especially suitable for engineers who develop new devices? As soon as we have a 3 channel ECG device which can handle with noisy ECG signals better than a Polar H10 and we have data that is highly accurate, we can do systematic scientific studies about consumer grade heart rate monitors and answer the open questions regarding this topic. But before such a device is available, who is interested in writing new papers about it? The topic has not yet been studied systematically and scientifically by other scientists than Rob ter Horst. And the scientist Rob ter Horst did unfortunately not write any papers about this topic. A next step would also be to use standartized testing protocols. We think the protocol which used by the Cleveland Clinic would be a good starting point:

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

For systematic and scientific studies about ECG heart rate monitors which can handle with noisy ECG signals better than the Polar H10. Does it make sense to study a lot of different protocols in different papers, which cannot be compared to each other right now? And the protocol from the Cleveland Clinic could be extended to a maximal speed, if 3 channel ECG devices are available which can handle with noisy ECG signals better than a Polar H10. Currently also the CE case sytem which is used to study resting heart rate and to make stress tests, uses a protocol on a treadmill with speeds which continously increases. We think it is worth to also study this protocol to see if it uses a standard and we eventually can use it.

And the question is for us personally is, will we ever come back to the topic consumer grade heart rate monitors for our application, since they where not developed for scientific purposes, and we see no evidence that this is a promising project with new and interesting devices.

Optical heart rate monitors are more comfortable to wear than ECG device. But can these replace those? We have no study which gives us hope in this direction. But what if we do not need an accuracy of 100 %? Optical heart rate monitors have become more accurate in recent years, nobody denies that fact. But why do we not have accuracy studies of the latest and most accurate Apple watches in a high quality scientific journal on a regular basis? Because the effort to do this is very big with the current methods. And it seems that it is currently not worth it for nobody to do such studies in scientific journals on a regular basis, else we would have these scientific studies.

For us personally, interesting would a community of reserachers who use the Cyton 3 channel ECG for scientific studies and write papers with it. If those would use this device for their research and write papers with it, the more reseracher do this, the more interesting this device gets. Id could also be a good starting point for engineers to develop a 3 channel ECG device which can handle with noisy ECG signals and is more accute than a Polar H10. We do not know of anybody who has ever developed such a device up to this date. But we have a fist paper as a staring point.

Researchers from the University of Calgary found that a 3-lead ECG device based on the OpenBCI Cyton board can be used for HRV measurements instead of an industry-standard 3 lead ECG device from Adinstruments and costs only about 4%

And do we have validation papers for the Polar H10 chest strap or the latest Apple watches which are at the level of this paper? We do not know of such a paper.