Last Updated on January 30, 2023 by pg@petergamma.org
If we look closely at the data of Rob ter Horst, we can guess that he strongly boosts the accuracy in the range of 95 % to 100 % compared to a Polar H10 chest strap. But are there any applications which require this high accuracy?
Rob ter Horst offers only data with two Polar H10 chest straps as a reference. This is interesting for athletes who use the Polar H10 for comparison. But are there any applications of athletes which require these high accuracy? We do not know of any.
In the papers of Dr Desais group and others, we can see that these reach accuracy values of 95% to 100 % compared to a Polar H10 chest strap, and a clinical or research grade ECG device:
This high accuracy could eventually be helpful for clinical and research applications. But although several papers are there to validate these sensors with clinical and research grade reference devices, we do not know of any clinical and research applications which use these sports watches.
Some of these watches are more accurate than devices which can also be used for clinical applications, for instance more accurate than finger peltismographs. But firstly, to use those for clinical and research applications, we require validation studies for this purpose. And this is time consuming. And who want to do a validation study with a sports watch which will next year be replaced by a newer one?
More interesting is for us personally to build a new device, but rather an ECG device which is build from scratch and for our own special application, this is more interesting than a PPG device. We do not know of anybody who has developed a highly accurate PPG sensor for clinical and research applications. We did not study the literature about this topic yet. There are certainly devices on the market for this purpose, and with a lot of money, you can also buy them.