Interested in casually tracking your heart rate? Try one of these apps, which use your smartphone’s camera.Interested in casually tracking your heart rate? Try one of these apps, which use your smartphone’s camera. Interested in casually tracking your heart rate? Try one of these apps, which use your smartphone’s camera.
When it comes to tracking your heart rate, nothing beats using equipment designed for such a purpose, such as chest strap heart rate monitors or electrocardiograms. However, if you’re looking for an easy way to get a potential measurement of your heart rate, there are smartphone apps out there that use your phone’s camera to measure heart rate.
Of course, these apps are not for medical use but are intended for informational purposes. That said, there are three apps you can try if you’re interested in casually tracking your heart rate. If you have any concerns, make sure to consult your doctor.
How apps can track your heart rate
Similarly to the heart rate trackers built into most fitness wearables, apps on your phone can measure your heart rate by detecting changes in blood volume below the skin’s surface — a practice called photoplethysmography.
Here’s how it works: Every time your heart beats, the amount of blood that reaches the capillaries in your fingers and face swells and then recedes. Because blood absorbs light, apps are able to capture this ebb and flow by using the flash of your phone’s camera to illuminate the skin and create a reflection.
How accurate are heart rate-tracking apps?
Although photoplethysmography is a tried-and-true practice, not all heart rate tracking apps are created equal. When researchers compared four of them to clinical gold standard measurements (ECG and fingertip pulse oximetry), they found that the heart rate readings generated by apps were off by over 20 beats per minute in over 20% of measurements.
The fact that heart rate apps don’t consistently perform as well as clinical-grade equipment isn’t too surprising — most, if not all, warn against medical use — but even within the apps, there were some winners and losers.
According to the study, apps that ask you to touch your finger to your phone’s built-in camera tend to be more accurate than those that just ask you to hold your phone’s camera up to your face.
Bottom line: App readings should always be taken with a grain of salt, but if you’re just looking for a high-level overview of your heart rate over time, it’s hard to beat the convenience of smartphone apps. With that in mind, below are three finger-touch heart rate apps that consistently come out on top.
Cardiio: Heart Rate Monitor
Based on technology licensed from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cardiio measures your heart rate in under 15 seconds flat. If you need a reminder to take your pulse, activate the built-in alert and set it to daily, weekly or monthly.
Take advantage of the free circuit workout to get fit and improve your stats, then easily export your data to wow your doc. Cardiio is completely free to use — you don’t even have to create an account. To unlock additional features, pay for them piecemeal (starting at $1.99) or upgrade to pro for a one-time payment of $9.99. The app also syncs with Apple Health.
Price: Free for iOS with in-app purchases
Instant Heart Rate: HR Monitor
This app is a favorite of heart rate researchers (it was even used in the study mentioned above). Like Cardiio, this heart rate monitor is free to use, but nearly everything else is behind a subscription paywall ($9.99 a month or $59.99 a year).
It’s not cheap, but what you get access to is pretty substantial: heart rate measurement, heart rate activity zone calculator, pulse waveform graphs, real-time photoplethysmogram (PPG) graph, StandUp test for fatigue and fitness testing and more. Syncs with Apple Health and Google Fit.
Price: Free for iOS and Android with in-app purchases
Cardiograph
With Cardiograph, you can measure your pulse while you’re at rest or in motion. You can tell the app what you are doing while you’re taking your pulse (resting, walking, running, etc.) so that the numbers are stored with added context in your health history. The app syncs with Apple Health and Android Wear — there’s even a version native to the Apple Watch.
The old version of this app — Cardiograph Classic — is still available for 99 cents, but the clean, intuitive design of the new version makes it well worth the extra buck.
Price: Free for Android with in-app purchases; $1.99 for iOS