Your smartwatch is lying to you

Video Description

Many leading brands of smartwatch are outright lying to users about resting heart rate, providing us with misleading numbers that make us seem far fitter than we actually are. So I decided to get to the bottom of these resting heart fakes, with a bit of help from YouTube’s Dr @MedlifeCrisis. You might also enjoy the previous video in this series, in which Rohin and I discuss the most important number for your health: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9H40yatCwo0 *Chapters* 00:00 Introduction 01:59 Dropping some beats 03:17 Am I crazy-super-fit?! 04:18 Why lie? 06:47 Sleeping heart rate *Sources and further reading* Sleeping vs resting heart rate in 11 teenage athletes https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0262333 The study I mention comparing the resting and sleeping heart rate for predicting all-cause mortality https://academic.oup.com/eurheartj/article/34/23/1732/425158 Links at which various manufacturers state how their ‘resting’ heart rate values are calculated: • Apple Watch https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204666 • Garmin https://www.garmin.com/en-GB/garmin-technology/health-science/heart-rate-monitoring/ but I also found this page https://support.garmin.com/en-US/?faq=F8YKCB4CJd5PG0DR9ICV3A which states ‘Daily RHR is calculated using the lowest 30 minute average in a 24 hour period.’ Though this doesn’t specifically target when you’re asleep, the lowest 30-minute average will almost certainly come from sleepytime… • WHOOP https://www.whoop.com/thelocker/resting-heart-rate-by-age-and-gender/ • Oura https://ouraring.com/blog/resting-heart-rate/ • Fitbit are super-vague about this and don’t seem to have any official information about this. But I enjoyed a quote in this paper looking at Fitbit users’ resting heart rate data, which states audaciously that ‘RHR was calculated by a proprietary formula’. It’s kind-of incredible to me that you can publish something so explicitly intransparent—especially in a journal like PLOS ONE that champions open science, open data and open code! https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0227709 *And finally…* Follow me on Twitter https://twitter.com/statto Follow me on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/andrewjsteele Like my page on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/DrAndrewSteele Follow me on Mastodon https://mas.to/@statto Read my book, _Ageless: The new science of getting older without getting old_ https://ageless.link/