ArticleSensors (Basel, Switzerland)2025
Impact of Anatomical Placement on the Accuracy of Wearable Heart Rate Monitors During Rest and Various Exercise Intensities.
Article in Sensors (Basel, Switzerland), 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 1 paper.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
1 citing paper in PubMed.
- Comparison of heart rate measurement accuracy among commercially available photoplethysmography-based wearable devices across exercise intensities.Physical activity and nutrition · 2026Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
purposeThis study evaluated the accuracy of arm-based photoplethysmography (PPG) wearable heart rate (HR) monitors in comparison to a validated chest strap reference across various activity levels.
methodsTwenty-eight healthy adults (14 males, 14 females; aged 23.8 ± 1.1 years) wore six HR monitors: Polar H10 chest strap, Polar Verity Sense on the forearm, Garmin Forerunner on the wrist, and three identical Whoop 4.0 devices placed on the left wrist, forearm, and upper arm. Participants completed rest, warm-up, high-intensity burpees, and graded treadmill exercise. HR data were analyzed using mean absolute percentage error (MAPE), Bland-Altman analysis, concordance correlation coefficient (CCC), and Deming regression.
resultsAccuracy was highest at rest and gradually decreased as movement intensity increased. During rest, all devices showed minimal bias and high agreement (CCC > 0.99), with Verity Sense recording the lowest MAPE. In warm-up, Whoop-upper arm and Verity Sense outperformed wrist and Garmin positions, while the Whoop-forearm showed proportional and systematic bias. Burpees resulted in the lowest accuracy across devices (CCC < 0.50), but Whoop-upper arm performed better than other placements. During the Modified Bruce protocol, Verity Sense and Whoop-upper arm had the strongest agreement with the chest strap. Placement of identical Whoop units affected accuracy, with the upper arm outperforming forearm and wrist positions.
conclusionsPPG wearables provided accurate HR monitoring at rest, during warm-up, and during steady-state graded exercise, particularly when positioned proximally (forearm or upper arm). Accuracy declined during short, high-intensity, full-body activities due to motion artifacts. Both the forearm-mounted Verity Sense and the upper-arm Whoop demonstrated the closest agreement with the chest-strap reference. The intra-device comparison of identical Whoop units confirmed that anatomical placement alone significantly affects accuracy.
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