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You should be concerned about the effectiveness of using health apps to measure your heart rate and evaluate your personal health. No matter how good technology seems to be, it’s not an alternative to getting a health assessment from a trained professional. Despite the problems with this technology, heart rate apps are becoming more popular lately as a way to assess health and perform other health tracking activities. So if you have one of these devices you need to be aware of what they can and can’t do and any problems with the data they collect. And the most serious problem with these devices has to do with the nature of the pulse waves themselves.

 

How Heart Rate Apps Work

Heart rate apps are supposed to be an accurate way to measure your pulse rate and detect any problems with your heart, which is why they’ve become an accepted health tracking activity. These apps are meant to measure and record your pulse by using camera to detect the movement of blood through the capillaries in your finger or at your wrist. But what isn’t commonly known is that these devices aren’t actually measuring the rate at which your heart beats. Instead they’re recording the occurrence of the pulse wave as it passed through the relevant part of your body.

 

What is the Pulse Wave?

A pulse wave is the result of interactions between the beating heart and the vessels that carry the blood to every part of your body. Every time your heart beats it sends blood through the arteries, veins and capillaries. This creates a phenomenon known as a pulse wave. Basically, when you press your fingers to your wrist or against the side of your throat and feel the beat, what you’re actually feeling is the pulse wave. Pulse waves can be felt in these areas because the capillaries that transport the blood are close to the skin. The pulse wave moves outwards from the heart and through every part of the body, including where you’re trying to measure your pulse rate. The resistance that the blood encounters as it pushes through the blood vessels is what forms the pulse wave shapes (see the pic.) that can be measured and recorded by your heart rate app.

The resistance that creates the pulse wave is determined by the size, shape and width of the vessels that the blood has to travel through. There are a lot of different factors that can make vessels wider or narrower and increase or decrease that resistance including specific illnesses, conditions and diseases. And because apps use the pulse wave to determine the heart rate, this can result in a very serious measurement problem.

 

Heart Rate Vs Pulse Rate

When you’re healthy, your pulse rate will be almost the same as your heart rate. Your heart will pump the blood through healthy veins that give very little resistance and so your pulse rate, the beating sensation in your throat or wrist, will be an accurate reflection of your heartbeat. However, if you have a problem with your blood vessels, such as a condition that causes stiffening in the arteries or capillaries, there can be a marked difference between the beat of your heart and the pulse wave. That’s why using devices that measure your pulse rate (the pulse wave) and mistaking them for your heart rate (the actual beat of your heart) can result in incorrect and even dangerous assumptions about your personal health.

 

Health Implications

If you use a heart rate app to measure your heart rate it can cause you to make a number of dangerous assumptions about your personal health. For starters, if you try to keep your heart rate in a designated range during exercise, your heart rate app may skew the results. The pulse wave that your heart rate app measures can be altered by the resistance created by your arteries, so if you have a condition that hardens your arteries, your pulse rate will be slower than your actual heart rate. This can be dangerous for people who need to be careful with their heart rate when they exercise.

 

Using a heart rate app can also give you an incorrect impression of your overall health. Assuming that your pulse rate is an accurate reflection of your heart beat ignores several conditions that can cause discrepancies with these results and mask the underlying issues. This is a very serious concern, and is just one of the reasons why you should always get a full health assessment if you have any concerns about your heart health. This will give you a clear picture of your personal health that a heart rate app just can’t match.

 

 

If you want to take control of your personal health, try HomeLab, the app that helps you monitor your health condition and keep track of any lifestyle changes you make.

 

 

Tags: personal health, health assessment, health tracking