If you have a cell phone, no need to worry about heart rate monitor any more. You can measure your heart rate now with your smartphone.
Using your mobile phone to track your health and especially heart rate is a good and easy way. Before the cell phone technology thrived, it was pretty challenging, but not anymore. However, there are a wide range of apps that can help you measure your heart beat, quality and accuracy can vary depending on their algorithms and AI technology used. The only feature you need in your cell phone to measure your heart beat is the camera.
Let’s dig out a few apps to check heart rate for smartphone. We’ll give you a brief overview about these apps.
How heart rate apps can track and measure your heart beat?
Although there are many devices already available to measure your heart rate; gadgets and other wearables, including smartwatches, the most reliable and easy among these devices is the cell phone. Today, each person owns at least a mobile phone. Therefore, measure your heart rate using your cell phone does not require you to arrange special equipment to go ahead for analysis.
Precisely, when it comes to measuring, your heart rate app detects the blood flow changes within your veins, arteries, and overall body and it gives results according to the reading it takes using cellphone camera. This practice is also called “photoplethysmography”.
When your heart beats, the blood flow through the arteries and veins changes, the camera notes the reading in changes and record the swell timing and receding. Since blood absorbs light, apps capture the ebb and flow through the camera to illuminate the skin and create a reflection.
What about the accuracy of these camera and app tracking results?
Photoplethysmography is a tried-and-true practice, every app is designed in different way using different algorithms because of which the results of each app is not same as other. However, these results are near to one another. Researchers conducted a research and compared four apps to clinical gold standard measurements (ECG and fingertip pulse oximetry), they concluded that the readings of heart beat generated by apps show more than 20 beats a minute in over 20% of measurements.
The researchers also concluded that the app associated phone’s built-in camera works better when recorded placing a fingertip over the camera than face. Here, we have come up with some popular accurate heart monitor apps, we recommend using these heart rate monitor apps for accuracy.
Welltory: Heart Rate Monitor
This app is designed for both iOS and Android users. However, the popular version of this app is the iOS since the camera can detect much accurate reading compared to the Android version, but still the Android version is quite near to the iOS version. The researchers from University of Minnesota stated that the iOS version of Welltory helped a lot to doctors and nurses when more patients are admitted and they need to check fast, quick, and need accurate results. Although Welltory is pretty famous among iOS users for monitoring heart rate, this app also contains other fantastic features, such as workout and sleep insights, also blood pressure monitoring.
For tracking heart rare, users place their fingertips over the camera and the app takes the reading and subsequently gives the best result. If you need a reminder to take your pulse reading, you should use built-in alert activation feature and set it to daily, weekly or monthly reminder.
Cardiio: Heart Rate Monitor
Cardiio is another heart rate monitor app for only iOS devices. According to the study of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cardiio can measure the heart rate under 15 seconds and also gives good results. Cardiio is free to use as the Welltory. Also, you are not supposed to create an account. To unlock additional features, they charge a price starting from $4.99. To upgrade to pro, you need to pay one-time payment of $9.99. The app also has an option to sync its data with Apple Health.
Cardiograph
With Cardiograph, you can record, measure, and analyze your pulse rate, regardless of being at rest or motion. You can insert your state as an input to the app to tell your activity during the reading and measuring heart rate, such as resting, running, walking, etc.). The app syncs with Android Wear and Apple Health.
In the Android version using the shared device, you have an option to setup or create multiple profiles for various individuals like your family members and friends. On iOS, you can also send text or share your heart rate data to others using iMessage extension in the app. The previous version of this app was Cardiograph Classic, but it was not free and charged 99 cents, but the new version is clean and has intuitive design, making it worthwhile for the extra buck.
