Last Updated on July 23, 2023 by pg@petergamma.org
A conclusion to which we came after we wrote our review about accuracy studies of consumer grade monitors is:
that altough medical and research grade ECG devices are very expensive and cost between 1’165 € for the biosignalsplux Explorer Kit incl. EG toolbox and the Vyntus ECG & SentrySuite software which costs a total of 47’500 USD:
a paper of the Swiss Federal Institute of Sports in Magglingen:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31004219/
claims that the 90 USD Polar H10 chest strap:
«might be recommended as the gold standard for RR interval assessments if intense activities with strong body movements are investigated»:
But for cardiologists, 3 lead ECG devices are gold standard for HR measurements. A paper written by cardiologists from the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio has shown that the Polar H7 chest strap is closest to a clinical grade ECG device, followed by the Apple watch 3 for runs on a treadmill up to 15 km/h:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6732081/
Nobody has shown to this date, that the Polar H10 chest strap is also gold standard for runs on a treadmill up to 15 km/h, a protocol which has been tested in this paper.
Do these findings make scientific studies of consumer grade heart rate monitors very unsatisfying? Do we have clearly defined scientific standards to perform such sutdies and do we have a generally accepted reference device which is known to be highly accurate?
One problem is that nobody has developed such a device especially for this purpose.
It his hard to believe that all the device devopers which developed all the mentioned research and medical grade ECG devices we mentioned fail to develop an ECG device which beats the 90 USD Polar H10 as far as accuracy is concerned.
We therefore invite all device developers to develop such a device. A good starting point to do this to build a new device which is based on this instruction:
Many other resources about this topic can be found in our journal.
In this context, we would like to suggest to use the following OpenBCI module for this purpose. It is an OpenBCI Cyton module with a WiFi Shield which is improved to resolve the issue of the original version, which caused noise during the acquisition process.
www.OpenBCI.com does not sell the OpenBCI Wifi shield anymore. The Ebay seller we mention does it, and he says he has resolved the issue which was the reason the OpenBCI WIFI shield was pulled from the market. We think it is worth testing this OpenBCI module and make the result available for everyone. An OpenBCI module with a WIFI shield is suitable for many applications, not only ECG applications, but also EEG applications which require a fast WIFI stream.
It has already been shown that a 3-lead ECG device based on the OpenBCI Cyton board can used instead of an industry-standard 3 lead ECG device from Adinstruments and costs only about 4%:
This makes the OpenBCI Cyton board suitable for clinical an research applications. It has the technical specifications which are reqired for this purpose as well as a valditation paper which is helpful for this purpose as well.