Last Updated on August 23, 2023 by pg@petergamma.org
As we sah the papers about the Polar OH1 tested with a g.tec g.Nautilus multipurpose device which costs 50 000 USD:
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0217288
and two papers written by cardiologists from the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio about consumer grade heart rate monitors:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6732081/
We where very happy about those. Finally we had found what we where looking for. The findings of DC Rainmaker and Rob ter Horst confirmed with ECG devices at the highest level, comparison tables to compare the accuracy of these devices, something everybody would expect from heart rate monitors in the champions league which were tested previously by testers in the campions league such as DC Rainmaker and Rob ter Horst.
At about the time when we studied these papers, we wrote Rob ter Horst and asked him to choose for instance a g.tec medical device instead of his Polar H10 chest strap as a reference device, as in one of the above papers. But Rob did not do this. Instead, he published a review about Holter ECG devices and the Polar H10 on his YouTube channel shortly after our request:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31004219/
We could not believe this. The Polar H10 chest strap which costs 90 USD is more accurate than a Schiller Medilog AR12 Plus Holter ECG device with 3 channels which costs 1’700 USD? Other research and medical grade ECG devices which where used to study the accuracy of consumer grade heart rate monitors in other papers cost 47’500 USD as for instance the Vyntus ECG with 12 channels with the SentrySuite software which is only sold together with the Ergospirometry system:
How can it be that the Polar H10 chest strap for 90 USD is more accurate than a Schiller Medilog AR12 Plus Holter ECG which costs 1’700 USD? We found out where the problem is from the g.tec medical support, which answered us upon our request a while ago, that they do not know of a manufacturer who has solved the problem of ECG motion artifacts.
But still, the Polar H10 with a signal quality of 99.6, tested and published in a paper in the European Journal of Physiology: can the authors of this paper convince physiologists and cardiologists to use the Polar H10 instead of 3 channel ECG devices?
The paper «RR interval signal quality of a heart rate monitor and an ECG Holter at rest and during exercise»
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=5985280403321421081&hl=de&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5
has been cited 256 times to this date. Where these mainly sports scientists looking for a paper which confirms that the Polar H10 chest strap is the most accurate heart rate monitor? In spite of the high signal quality of 99.6 % of the Polar H10 we see no patients in hospitals wearing the Polar H10, altough Rob ter Horst says the Polar H10 has the best heart rate and is the gold standard for research.
But also after Rob ter Horst has published this review on YouTube, we did not buy a Polar H10 chest strap for our research. But instead, we continued to review about this topic for about a year in our journal. What we found out since then is that research institutes with expensive devices and cardiologists with expensive equipment as well did not publish any new papers about consumer grade heart rate monitors. But reserachers found out a long time ago in a paper published in 1989, that not the Polar H10 chest strap, but ECG devices with 3 channels are the most accurate onces:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2720055/
and this paper has been cited 8231 times to this date. We do not discuss here the range of intense activities with strong body movements. Why did the authors of the Swiss study not cite this important paper? For us personally, this paper published already in 1989 was a turn around. 3 channel ECG devices are the most accurate ones if intense activities with strong body movements are not investigated. Only the Polar H10 managed to handle with intense activities with strong body movements, the expensive devices failed with these activities.
But this does not matter for meditators like us anyway. But it took as a long time to withdraw from consumer grade heart rate monitors such as the Polar OH1 and Apple watches, and to find this important information about the accuracy of 3 channel ECG devices. Was this caused by the fact, that Rob ter Horst has already published 162 videos and DC Rainmaker 1129 videos on YouTube about topics like this? The Cleveland Clinic has published 4636 videos on YouTube as well, but only two papers about consumer grade heart rate monitors to this date.
But these two studies about heart rate monitors at the level of a clinical study where more helpful for us personally than all the videos on YouTube. And the paper of the Swiss Federal Institute of Sports in Magglingen made us not choose the Polar H10 chest strap for our research. We decided to choose a 3 channel Cyton ECG for our needs, from which we think it would also be accepted by the cardiologists from the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, if someone would use this device on a regular basis for clinical and research applications, and would show that it is helpful for this purpose.
Currently only devices from g.tec medical, Biopac, iWorx and Adinstruments and from companies which offer similar devices which are very expensive are used in scientific studies published in high quality scientific journals. And that is eventually why researchers are ready to pay the high costs for these devices. But if a Research Institute as the Meditation Reserach Institute Switzerland (MRIS) starts a new research project, nobody can convince us to buy a g.tec medical device instead of a Cyton board, since if we need a proof for the high accuracy of the Cyton board, we already have one:
And if further studies are necessary to proof the high accuracy of the 3 channel Cyton ECG, it has the necessary specifications to be a 3 channel gold standard ECG device to do further studies with it. But neither the Polar H10 nor the Apple watch Ultra meets this requirements, and Rob ter Horst can publish as many YouTube videos as he want on his channel, this does not change anything about these facts.