Last Updated on February 2, 2023 by pg@petergamma.org
We found that several serious researcher did this. Especially interesting was the scientific papers from really serious scientists who published really serious scientific studies about sports watches.
What stroke us is, that all of them have let go if these devices. We suppose it is because it was not worth for them to do further research about this topic.
But what is disappointing somehow for us personally are the scientific studies of sports scientists about sport sensor accuracy. We do not know of any standard protocols to test those. We do not know of standardized tests to test the accuracy of these devices. We do not doubt about the tests of the signal quality of the Polar H10 the Swiss Federal Institute of Sports has done with this chest strap. But we could not find generally accepted tests, test methods and standard procedures to test the quality of for instance optical heart rate sports watches.
One of the view who does these tests is Rob ter Horst. But unfortunately, his tests are not published in a scientific journal with numerical and statistical data. We come back to the question: is it worth to do really serious research work about consumer grade sports watches and EEG devices?
If this would be done, these devices would not be consumer grade devices anymore, but they where clinical and research grade devices, since they where then tested for this purpose. But for whom is it worth to do this effort?
What we miss are standardized tests to test the quality of sports watches and EEG devices which are published in scientific journals. There are a large number of accuracy testers of consumer grade sports watches. But we suppose the sports watch manufacturers make a big effort and work against it so that only view scientific data with numerical and statistical data are available for sports sensor watches. If these data where available in scientific journals with accuracy rankings, this would increase the accuracy and the quality of these devices.
The cardiologists from Cleveland Clinic in Ohio did these kind of tests in two papers, and then they stopped it. Is this because the effort to do this was to big and the result for those not satisfying enough?