Wrist-worn optical and chest strap heart rate comparison in a heterogeneous sample of healthy individuals and in coronary artery disease patients.

Background: The need for unobtrusive HR (heart rate) monitoring has led to the development of a new generation of strapless HR monitors. The aim of this study was to determine whether such an unobtrusive, wrist-worn optical HR monitor (OHRM) could be equivalent and therefore a valid alternative to a traditional chest strap during a broad range of activities in a heterogeneous healthy population and coronary artery disease (CAD) patients.

Methods: One hundred ninety-nine healthy volunteers, 84 males and 115 females, including 35 overweight-obese subjects, 53 pregnant women, and 20 CAD patients were tested in the present study. Second-by-second HR measured by the OHRM was concurrently evaluated against an ECG-based chest strap monitor during a broad range of activities (i.e., walking, running, cycling, gym, household, and sedentary activities).

Results: Data coverage, percentage of time the OHRM provides a HR not larger than 10 bpm from the reference, went from a minimum of 92% of the time in the least periodic activity (i.e., gym), to 95% during the most intense activity (i.e., running), and to a maximum of 98% for sedentary activities. The limits of agreement of the difference between the OHRM and the chest strap HR were within the range of ±15 bpm. The OHRM showed a concordance correlation coefficient of 0.98. Overall, the mean absolute error was not larger than 3 bpm, which can be considered clinically acceptable for a number of applications. A similar performance was found for CAD (94.2% coverage, 2.4 bpm error), but the small sample size does not allow any quantitative comparison.

Conclusion: Heart rate measured by OHRM at the wrist and ECG-based HR measured via a traditional chest strap are acceptably close in a broad range of activities in a heterogeneous, healthy population, and showed initial promising results also in CAD patients.