[Research] On The Accuracy of Wearables for HRV
This week, a study by Joshua Hagen and his group caught my eye. The study, led by Michael Dial, looked at the accuracy of a few wearables in the context of measuring night heart rate and HRV data (full text here).
As you know very well by now, there are better ways to track your physiological response, i.e. first thing in the morning (reasons covered in detail here, with yet another example from recent research here).
Wearables are however out there and despite measuring at a sub-optimal time, they could still provide accurate data, which just needs to be contextualized and interpreted differently. Do they?
According to the paper, some of them do. For example, the oura ring (versions 3 and 4) performed best, followed by whoop (“moderate accuracy”), and then garmin and polar (both “poor”).
Needless to say, the accuracy changes between devices, within generations of the same device, with firmware or software updates, based on your baseline HRV, etc. - hence even if you decide to use one of these devices, always use as frame of reference your recently collected data and don’t get fooled by firmware or software updates.
Even better, measure your HRV first thing in the morning, as covered here.
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Marco holds a PhD cum laude in applied machine learning, a M.Sc. cum laude in computer science engineering, and a M.Sc. cum laude in human movement sciences and high-performance coaching. He is a certified ultrarunning coach.
Marco has published more than 50 papers and patents at the intersection between physiology, health, technology, and human performance.
He is co-founder of HRV4Training, advisor at Oura, guest lecturer at VU Amsterdam, and editor for IEEE Pervasive Computing Magazine. He loves running.
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