Your connected watch is lying to you

Many major smartwatch brands outright lie to users about resting heart rate, providing us with misleading numbers that make us appear much healthier than we actually are. So I decided to get to the bottom of these resting heart fakes, with the help of YouTube's Dr. @MedlifeCrisis.

You might also enjoy the previous video in this series, in which Rohin and I discuss the most important number for your health: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v9H40yatCwo0

*Chapters*

00:00 Presentation
01:59 Dropping some beats
03:17 Am I crazy fit?!
04:18 Why lie?
06:47 Sleepy heart rate

*Sources and further reading*

Sleeping and resting heart rate in 11 adolescent athletes https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id10.1371/journal.pone.0262333
The study I mention comparing resting and sleeping heart rate to predict all-cause mortality https://academic.oup.com/eurheartj/article/34/23/1732/425158

Links where different manufacturers indicate how their “resting” heart rate values are calculated:
• Apple Watch https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204666
• Garmin https://www.garmin.com/en-GB/garmin-technology/health-science/heart-rate-monitoring/ but I also found this page https://support.garmin.com/en- US/?faqF8YKCB4CJd5PG0DR9ICV3A which states “Daily RHR is calculated using the lowest 30-minute average over a 24-hour period. » While this doesn't specifically target when you sleep, the lowest 30-minute average will almost certainly come from sleep time…
• WHOOP https://www.whoop.com/thelocker/resting-heart-rate-by-age-and-gender/
• Oura https://ouraring.com/blog/resting-heart-rate/
• Fitbit is very vague about this and doesn't seem to have any official information on it. But I appreciated a quote in this article examining Fitbit users' resting heart rate data, which boldly states that "RHR was calculated by a proprietary formula." It's pretty incredible to me that you can publish something so explicitly opaque, especially in a journal like PLOS ONE that champions open science, open data, and open coding! https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id10.1371/journal.pone.0227709

*And finally…*

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