Heart Rate

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What is this?

Your heart rate is the speed at which your heartbeats. It shows the number of contractions of your heart in beats per minute (bpm). By continuously measuring your heart rate you can see it in real-time.

Why is it important?

Heart rate is commonly used for determining a person’s physiological status (for example, healthy or sick, relaxed or stressed, fit or unfit). Furthermore, your heart rate continuously adapts to ensure that oxygen-rich blood is pumped to all parts of your body. Continuous tracking of your heart rate can provide valuable insights into how your body responds to the environment around it, as well as to the actions you take to improve your health.

Guidelines

Your heart rate varies throughout the day, increasing while you’re up and about and decreasing while you are at rest.

How is this measured?

Your continuous heart rate is measured using motion-compensated photoplethysmography. That’s a mouthful, so let’s just call it PPG. PPG is a way to use light to determine volume. Look under your device: your blood absorbs the light emitted from the LED lights you see there. The more blood is pumped through your blood vessels, the more light will be absorbed. The light that is not absorbed gets reflected back to the device and is measured by the PPG sensors. Each heartbeat causes a change in the blood volume in your skin. The PPG sensors are able to pick up changes in your blood volume, and thereby your heart rate.

Your heart rate values (average, maximum and resting heart rate), along with various other LifeQ metrics, are all extracted from your continuous heart rate.