What is it about?
Fitness trackers are a relatively new trend and many people are trying to understand more about their health, performance and wellbeing. These trackers are often used to track activities such as steps and calories burnt. However, newer trackers are also able to measure heart-rate right from your wrist. They do this by shining light into your skin, collecting the light that was not absorbed by the blood and using this information to estimate how hard your heart is pumping. This sounds all pretty simple but the key question is how accurate the heart rates are that these trackers measure. Also, while many researchers have checked this in a laboratory environment where a lot of things can be controlled, real-life accuracy has rarely been assessed.
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Why is it important?
This work is important as it is the first in which heart-rate measures of wrist-worn trackers have been assessed comprehensively in the lab and real-life. The implications of our research are that heart-rate measures of trackers are reasonably trustworthy at lower activity intensity levels. However, many campaigns and also the World Health Organization encourages that people should accumulate more intense physical activity. Using a tracker to monitor such activities might be problematic.
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Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Validity of heart-rate measures from wrist-worn activity trackers in a laboratory and free-living setting (Preprint), JMIR mhealth and uhealth, March 2019, JMIR Publications Inc.,
DOI: 10.2196/14120.
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