Last Updated on January 19, 2023 by pg@petergamma.org
The Institute for Intelligent Systems Research and Innovation, Deakin University, Waurn Ponds, VIC 3216, Australia used a gtec medical device with 64 channels which costs more than 50 000 USD to validate the accuracy of the Polar OH1:
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0217288
and published a paper in PLOS ONE about it. No follow up papers followed in higher quality journals. Polar screws around at the running time of the Verity Sense to make it run longer. We trust Polar and DC Rainmaker that this firmware update did not decrease the accuracy, but nobody has demonstrated this in a scientific journal, this was most probably only demonstrated in a Polar internal technical report.
The group of Dr Desai from Cleveland Clinic in Ohio tested the accuracy of the Apple watch 1 and 3, and found them to be accurate. But they did not test the successor Apple watches. There are no follow up papers of this group either.
Dr. Matthews from Montclair State University still uses Adinstruments Labchart software, Adinstruments channel recorders, CASE Cardiac Assessment System for Exercise Testing, Polar E600 chest strap heart rate monitor and Polar T31 type heart rate monitor to publish in journals like the Journal of Neurophysiology, and Medicine and science in sports and exercice.
Dr. Matthews, Dr Desai and the Meditation Research Institute Switzerland lack scientific studies to use the Polar OH1, Verity Sense, the Polar H10 for clinical applications. Also William Croft has only an instruction for a 3 lead ECG device to offer to those.
Our hypothesis is that a 3 lead ECG open source hardware and software device with an AD8232 chip and at least 16 bit A/D resolution with HeartPy is the most low-cost high quality ECG device for clinical and research applications. Unfortunately, we do not know of any studies who demonstrates this.