Is there any watch on the market that has enough battery to do real continuous HR monitoring? Last I checked, they all only measure continuously in the "sport" mode for an hour or two, and in the "regular" mode they measure HR once every 10 minutes or so.
We've had surprisingly good experiences—generally the beta testers are reporting 1-3% battery consumption, and I think we could sample more frequently.
I think if we can get true, beat-to-beat monitoring, the health implications would be huge. Doctors don't care a whole lot about steps, but they definitely care about heart rhythm.
Sorry if this is a dumb question, but 1-3% over what time period? Per hour? Per day? Or are you saying it increases the normal idle power consumption by 1-3%?
I have the Samsung Gear 2 Neo, and tried building an app to record HR all day sampling once per second. A full battery lasts about 12 hours in this condition. However, the heart rate monitor subsystem crashes fairly often, and gets very inaccurate with pretty much any arm motion. So not super useful.
Basis, Amiigo (not yet for sale), and even Epson have wrist-based trackers which claim some form of continuous heart rate monitoring. The Epson in particular seems interesting, as they developed the sensor in-house with a focus on power management; they say it can record continuously for 40 hours.
I have the Gear Fit and while it doesn't crash, the sport mode is very inconsistent while running. Tightening the band might help but it's uncomfortably tight.
Suunto's watches have done that for a while now (5-6 years?), though they use a capacitive chest strap, rather than the optical method used by smart watches.
Edit: And as far as I know, Suunto was really the first company to pursue measurement of HR variability. They have some interesting whitepapers, if you use the Google.
In the first release of the Band's firmware, it wasn't consistently good (especially during workouts!), but it's gotten much better with the 2nd and subsequent firmware releases.
It was recently on sale for $180, and I'm going to guess it'll be on sale again, since the Apple Watch is just starting to ship and new Android watches are expected to be announced around Google IO in late May.
https://moto360.motorola.com/
Note: the heart rate monitors on these early devices aren't great! We have to do a lot of work to make sure the sensor works well and the graphs are understandable. But I think the hardware will improve rapidly in the next 6-18 months.
That's a frequent feature request, so hopefully soon--the thing I'm not sure of is whether those things are even close enough to accurate to be worth it. I think "guesstimate" is a great word for it. :)
Way better than I expected—on my Moto 360, total battery consumption is usually 1-2%, and the beta testers have reported the same. In my experience, the biggest optimization you can do for Moto 360 battery life is to disable tilt-to-wake, since the most power-hungry part of the watch is the display.
We do indeed sync the data to Google Fit—so it both reads your activities (walking, running, biking) from Google Fit and any connected apps you have, and writes the raw heart rate measurements back to Google Fit.
Oh! I wrapped up my involvement last fall. It was a 2-month rotation that became 3 months, then 5 months, then 8 months, ...
After taking a couple months off, I started collaborating with some UCSF researchers--we know that in the next few years, millions of people are going to be wearing heart rate monitors. But what does that mean for healthcare? Can we actually detect things like heart attacks or lethal arrhythmias before it's too late? Could we potentially build the "check engine light" for your heart?
In a related question, does anyone know of any monitoring product (e.g. FitBit or whatever) that does NOT send your data to a centralized server outside of your control?
It does send the data back to GFit! Warning though—the GFit graph isn't necessarily built for this resolution of data. That's part of why we built our own chart to show you the details.
You are right. A few months ago Jawbone UP3 definitely had HRV listed in the heart health features. That's specifically why I was looking to buy it. I guess that's close to impossible with an optical sensor.
Even the standalone optical HRMs (e.g., Scosche RHYTHM+) aren't good enough to do HRV[1] even though their accuracy compares favorably with the chest strap models[2]
Photoplethsymographic heart rate requires a lot of algorithmic compensation for noise and motion artifact. There are some pretty sophisticated strategies available for beat interpolation, but individual R-R intervals are tremendously more difficult to recover accurately against real-world noise. HRV measurements are also very intolerant to error in R-R interval, and even less so to dropped beats. There are certainly conceivable solutions to these problems, but no major manufacturer of PPG based consumer heart rate devices allows access at a level low enough to get R-R time series or understand R-R interval confidence. OEM module manufacturers for pulse ox devices do allow direct serial access to the PPG waveform for those interested in hacking at it.
An app like this could save a life one day, for sure. My uncle recently died from a heart attack. It's impossible to know for sure but perhaps if he'd been wearing a smart watch, it could have told him to seek help before it hit.
I'm not a doctor, but based on what little research I've done in the past, a basic heart rate monitor such is this is unlikely to provide any pre-warning of a serious cardiac event.
OP - I love the concept, but the execution isn't there. I installed it on my Gear Live, and it pops up a "Heart Rate" notification, that until acknowledged leaves the heart rate sensor on. (the green light underneath). This would obliterate the battery. It needs to do it's thing, and go away, not wait for me to tell it to, or even notify me at all. I'm not sure with the API if this is possible or not, but for now, I'm sorry.. it's just not usable.
Thanks for trying it. The notification actually doesn't control the sensor (green light) -- I think the timing was likely just a coincidence.
That said, we haven't had a lot of people with Gear Lives test the app yet, so it's always possible you've stumbled on some novel bug that only appears on certain hardware. Wouldn't be the first time. :)
If that behavior is reproducible, can you send a bug report to brandon@cardiogr.am?
I use a fitness tracker called MIO Fuse - it's a great сontinious Heart Rate Monitor, but Mio has very painful and useless both Android and iOS app. I wish to have access to raw data or integrate it with something like Cardiogram because it's really insightful to see how your heart responds to various events.
Hey Brandon, I'm doing usability research at Virginia Tech on EEG's and EKG's. I'm trying to figure out how to do continuous heart rate for Apple Watch for an app/study.
How are you getting the Heart Rate on the watch? I've looked into WatchKit and I couldn't find anything about getting the heart rate back out of the device. I was thinking about using Healthkit to try to do something similar. If there's any chance, we could talk/skype sometime, please let me know!
Thank you so much, I had hoped that there would be something like this inbuilt with motofit/google fit but was quite disappointed when I discovered how inadequate and manual it was. I don't need to sell my android watch anymore.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 118 ms ] threadJust for fun, this was my heart rate while launching this: https://twitter.com/AppCardiogram/status/591377862441046016
I think if we can get true, beat-to-beat monitoring, the health implications would be huge. Doctors don't care a whole lot about steps, but they definitely care about heart rhythm.
https://www.fitbit.com/chargehr
Stores heart rate data at 1 second intervals during exercise tracking and at 5 second intervals all other times
Thank you!
Basis, Amiigo (not yet for sale), and even Epson have wrist-based trackers which claim some form of continuous heart rate monitoring. The Epson in particular seems interesting, as they developed the sensor in-house with a focus on power management; they say it can record continuously for 40 hours.
Edit: And as far as I know, Suunto was really the first company to pursue measurement of HR variability. They have some interesting whitepapers, if you use the Google.
Uh, now I just need an Android Wear device...
It was recently on sale for $180, and I'm going to guess it'll be on sale again, since the Apple Watch is just starting to ship and new Android watches are expected to be announced around Google IO in late May. https://moto360.motorola.com/
Note: the heart rate monitors on these early devices aren't great! We have to do a lot of work to make sure the sensor works well and the graphs are understandable. But I think the hardware will improve rapidly in the next 6-18 months.
It'd be great if I can access my data there.
Nice work! I've been looking for something like this.
I just realized who you are.
Taking time off from healthcare.gov?
After taking a couple months off, I started collaborating with some UCSF researchers--we know that in the next few years, millions of people are going to be wearing heart rate monitors. But what does that mean for healthcare? Can we actually detect things like heart attacks or lethal arrhythmias before it's too late? Could we potentially build the "check engine light" for your heart?
So that's what this app is a first step toward.
[1] http://www.dcrainmaker.com/2014/05/scosche-antbluetooth-opti... about 10% down the page [2] http://www.dcrainmaker.com/2014/05/scosche-antbluetooth-opti...
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204666
That said, we haven't had a lot of people with Gear Lives test the app yet, so it's always possible you've stumbled on some novel bug that only appears on certain hardware. Wouldn't be the first time. :)
If that behavior is reproducible, can you send a bug report to brandon@cardiogr.am?
How are you getting the Heart Rate on the watch? I've looked into WatchKit and I couldn't find anything about getting the heart rate back out of the device. I was thinking about using Healthkit to try to do something similar. If there's any chance, we could talk/skype sometime, please let me know!