The Apple watch or ECG for meditation monitoring?

Last Updated on January 27, 2024 by pg@petergamma.org

Nature published in recent years papers about the Apple watch as well about ECG devices. But which one to choose for meditators? We have reviewed about this topic intensively. The paper which stroke us the most about the Apple in recent years was a Nature paper with the title:

The Apple Watch can detect atrial fibrillation: so what now?

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41569-019-0330-y

But next to this paper we do not know of another paper which would be worth mentioning for our application:

090. Review of Accuracy Studies of Consumer Grade Heart Rate Monitors: Methods, Testing Protocols, Reference Devices

But what stroke us was that we do not know of researchers who published a second paper about consumer grade optical heart rate monitors after they have published a first one using the same testing protocol with a more recent consumer grade optical heart rate monitor than they used in their first paper.

We decided to use ECG devices instead of PPG devices, but we haven’t started to use those, since they are not as easy to handle as consumer grade optical heart rate monitors. But we found a scientific report in Nature which says:

Single-lead ECG based autonomic nervous system assessment for meditation monitoring:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-27121-x

The Apple watch can detect atrial fibrillation, and there was a comment about it in a Nature paper, but the comment was «so what now?» And there is no Nature paper which comments that the Apple watch can be used for meditation monitoring. But there is a scientific report in Nature that a single-lead ECG can be used for meditation monitoring. And this scientific report has been published in Nature, and not in “Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise”. The first paper of the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio about consumer grade heart rate monitors was published in “Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise”:

https://journals.lww.com/acsm-msse/Fulltext/2017/08000/Variable_Accuracy_of_Wearable_Heart_Rate_Monitors.22.aspx

The Cleveland Clinic also tested the Apple watch for atrial fibrillation, but did not publish the results in Nature as far as we know. And we obseved now that a paper has been published in a journal at the highest level about a single lead ECG device, but not for optical heart rate monitors as far as our applications are concerned. We previously had for instance the Firstbeat body guard which has been validated for activities at rest, but this device has only been validated in a white paper on the website of the manufacturer:

https://assets.firstbeat.com/firstbeat/uploads/2015/10/white_paper_bodyguard2_final.pdf

We did not go through the scientific report in Nature about single lead ECG an meditation yet, but the paper is very interesting for us personally, and we hope that other meditation researchers are sharing the same interests as we do and are interested in the scientific report in Nature as we are. For the time being we decided for this device for meditation monitoring:

093. Low-cost high-quality physiological sensor devices with the highest number of citations in our journal

And we hope it will be used to publish papers in Nature, too. But we know now from the scientific report in Nature that a single lead ECG is sufficient for mediation monitoring, and we do not need 3 channels which is the gold standard for ECG for this. And that means we only need a single channel of OpenBCI and not 3 channels for meditation monitoring.