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Comment by ctvo | Hacker News Reader

Is there an app for this yet? I wear an Apple Watch all day -- it'd be great if something were available. Poll every 10 minutes for 30s or something to conserve battery maybe.

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At least my high end Garmin watch with built-in optical HRM doesn't consider the OHRM accurate enough for HRV measurement purposes. Instead I have to pair a heart rate strap and use that for an HRV measurement. This seems typical:

https://elitehrv.com/compatible-devices

As far as I know, the best apps for HRV are Marco Altini's: http://www.marcoaltini.com/apps.html

Apple Watch already polls you every 5mins or so throughout the day. You can use an app like Cardiogram to hook into the Apple Watch data to visualize nice graphs and correlations.

HRV is defined as variability in the interval between individual heartbeats. Pulse data with a 5min-granularity won't help.

I don't believe the Apple Watch is good enough to do this "properly" because the optical sensors don't have the basic resolution or access to the R-R interval (the pertinent bit of information) which things like Garmin HRM straps do (because they're basically mini-EEG machines.)

Look in your health data on your iPhone under heart rate and show all data... the Apple Watch already collects heart rate samples all day long. All that's needed is something to make a nice display for the collected data points.

The Stress applet on Samsung Health on their phones apparently measures heart rate variability by taking your heart rate over a period of about a minute

Yes, there is an app, according to the article: "Every morning, as soon as he wakes up, Iñaki de la Parra, an endurance athlete from Mexico, uses a heart-rate monitor he straps to his chest and an app on his smartphone to measure the tiny variations in the intervals between his heartbeats."

I wouldn't know what the app is, whether anything that works with the Apple Watch exists, or even whether the Apple Watch has an API that would allow an app to measure it.

At least on iOS, there's a whole range of HRV apps that can read from an ANT+ (with dongle) or Bluetooth HRM strap. I used to use Sweetbeat (not iOS 11 compatible) before the various Garmin watches got apps that could do it (which is a lot easier.)

ithlete is an app I used for measuring HRV

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