Peter Gamma (Physiologist & Director) Meditation Research Institute Switzerland (MRIS)

90.17 Generally accepted highly accurate ECG reference devices for accuracy studies for consumer grade heart rate monitors?

Last Updated on October 2, 2022 by pg@petergamma.org

We have intensely reviewed potential ECG devices which can be used as research grade ECG devices for studies of the accuracy of consumer grade heart rate monitors, from Bitalino ECG, Scott Hardens PhD. MD. Sound Card ECG, AD8232 & ESP8266 ECG, etc.

We came to the conclusion that a main problem that there is no generally accepted reference device, could be ECG motion artifacts.

We found two candidates which potentially could solve this problem:

  1. The Adinstruments Equivital 02 devices, which where produced on 10. Apr. 2019 and later on (*1):

This is the only commercially available device which is sold as noise and motion artifact free ECG device.

2. The OpenBCI Cyton with 4 channels, 5 electrodes, 24 bit sampling rate, and HeartPy toolbox for very noisy ECG signals:

Which is potentially highly accurate.

Nobody has ever tested these devices before in this configuration. These devices are potentially more accurate than the Polar H10 chest strap. Tests of these devices could trigger new papers which would rise the quality of reference devices for accuracy studies for consumer grade sports sensors to a level, which is of interest for clinical and biomedical applications. Which doctors and which scientists can be convinced by accuracy studies performed with a Polar H10 sports chest strap as a reference device?

(*1) The 10. Apr. 2019 was the release date of an Adinstruments promo video on the global YouTube channel for ADInstruments Ltd., in which the ECG device was advertised as “movement artifact free ECG device“.

Check the costs for the Adinstruments Equivital & LabChart software, and check if it fits to our research grant:

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