Hey! I'm the OP. Let me know if you have any questions.
Just for fun, this was my heart rate while launching this: https://twitter.com/AppCardiogram/status/591377862441046016
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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.
I have a Fitbit Charge HR that checks every second during exercise and every 5 seconds otherwise. The battery lasts about 4 days for me.
Indeed, found this on the linked page:
Stores heart rate data at 1 second intervals during exercise tracking and at 5 second intervals all other times
Thank you!
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.
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%?
1-3% per day, as measured by the "watch battery" panel in the Android Wear app. (Mine is currently at 1%).
How often do you sample?
Does this report heart rate data back to Google Fit, or does it only read info from Google Fit?