ArticleEuropean journal of applied physiology2026
Influence of skin pigmentation on the accuracy and data quality of photoplethysmographic heart rate measurement during exercise.
Article in European journal of applied physiology, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
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Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed.
- Orthometria: Metric Fixation in Digital Health and a Framework for Responsible Use in High-Performance Sport.Sports medicine - open · 2026Article
- AI-Ready Multimodal Wearable Biosensors Beyond Glucose: Biofluid Sampling, Sensor Fusion, and Clinical Translation.Biosensors · 2026Review
- Comparison of heart rate measurement accuracy among commercially available photoplethysmography-based wearable devices across exercise intensities.Physical activity and nutrition · 2026Article
- Modeling heart rate (HR) dynamics to reconstruct missing HR data in trail running.BMC sports science, medicine & rehabilitation · 2026Article
- Detecting sleep apnea using non-linear measures of heart rate variability.Respiratory research · 2026Article
- The digital divide in cardiovascular care: who gets left behind?European heart journal. Digital health · 2026Article
- The accuracy of Apple Watch measurements: a living systematic review and meta-analysis.NPJ digital medicine · 2026Article
- Reducing bias and enhancing equity in AI-enabled precision nutrition: addressing measurement error across wearables, multiomics, and dietary data.Frontiers in digital health · 2026Review
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
introductionWearable devices often use photoplethysmography to estimate heart rate (HR) by measuring light reflected from the cutaneous vascular bed. Notably, higher melanin content of the epidermis may reduce the amount of light transmitted through the skin. Previous studies examining the impact of skin tone on photoplethysmographic HR measurement accuracy have produced mixed results; however, none measured epidermal melanin content. PURPOSE: To determine whether objectively measured skin pigmentation influences the accuracy of photoplethysmographic HR measurement during rest, exercise, and recovery.
methodsSkin pigmentation was quantified from colorimeter measures using Individual Typology Angle (ITA°), a strong correlate of epidermal melanin, in 28 healthy adults (White, n = 16; Black, n = 10; Middle Eastern, n = 1; Persian, n = 1). Chest-worn HR (criterion; Polar H10) and photoplethysmographic HR from three devices (Apple Watch Series 8, Garmin vivosmart 5, SlateSafety BAND V2) were recorded continuously during rest, cycling, and recovery; HR data were averaged into 30-s epochs for analysis. A linear mixed-effects model determined whether ITA° influenced mean absolute error of HR (MAE
resultsITA° predicted MAE
conclusionData quality was negatively impacted by darker skin pigmentation for all tested devices, but skin pigmentation (ITA°) only increased photoplethysmographic HR measurement error to a small degree (~ 1 bpm) for the SlateSafety device.
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