How do smart watch heart rate monitors work?

28 May 2021

Person wearing a smart watch on one hand and holding a mobile phone on another. The smart watch showing the distance, timer and pace.

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Learn how smart watches monitor your heart rate, and how this valuable data can keep you fit and healthy.

Smart watches are now better than ever. Housing features like GPS, fall detection and blood oxygen app, it’s easy to see how they become so invaluable in our daily routines. Let’s dive a little deeper into one of the smart watch’s most useful features: the heart rate app.

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A heart rate monitor, whether on a portable device such as a smart watch or used in clinical settings is designed to measure or display your heart rate in real time. This is usually done when the wearer is engaging in some sort of physical exercise to gauge fitness levels.

So, how does this tech work in a smart watch? In the newer smart watch iterations, the heart rate monitor works in tandem with a Heart Rate app, where others, like Samsung’s Galaxy Watch for example, have the feature built in, where it simply needs to be activated. Some smart watches incorporate electrodes in their design to measure the heart’s electrical signals, or measures your heart rate with lights and sensors located on the back of your watch.

The heart rate measurement features on wearable devices are often used to promote general health and fitness. For example, if you’re exercising, it can track your heart rate before and after your workout, giving you a fairly accurate fitness result. This information is essential for both professional athletes and those just starting their fitness journey.

Heart rate monitors can also help keep an record of sleep. Measuring how long you stayed in each sleep cycle: deep, REM, light sleeping and when and how long you were awake. You then get a report of your sleep cycles which can potentially be forwarded to medical professionals for further analysis, if they think it might help them.

As mentioned above, the heart rate monitor can be used to detect anomalies or irregularities in the heart’s rhythm. The smart watch and your chosen heart rate app record your regular heart beat during inactivity, if your BPM (beats per minutes) dips or rises significantly after a period of 10 minutes of no activity, the smart watch will notify you.

If you’re on the hunt for a smart watch that has a heart rate monitor, check out the Apple Watch Series 10.

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