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Pulse oximetry

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How accurate is the Apple Watch heart-rate monitor? This accurate …

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If you were wondering whether the sophisticated heart-rate monitor in the Apple Watch does actually generate more accurate results, the answer appears to be a pretty resounding ‘yes.’ Software engineer and SonoPlot founder Brad Larson extracted the raw data from his Apple Watch and compared it to that generated by a dedicated heart-rate monitor. The results can be seen above.

The comparison device, a Mio Alpha, has itself been shown to have 99% accuracy when compared to the gold standard of chest strap monitors.

A teardown of the Apple Watch revealed that it contains a pulse oximeter, suggesting that future updates or models may be able to measure the oxygen content of our blood, useful data for both health and fitness measures. A separate chip analysis reveals plenty of scope for both performance and energy efficiency gains in future models.

Via iClarified

Apple Watch teardown reveals pulse oximeter, suggesting future measurement of blood oxygen

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pulse-oximeter

iFixit’s teardown of the Apple Watch has revealed that the sophisticated heart-rate monitor used is actually capable of acting as a pulse oximeter, allowing it to calculate the oxygen content of your blood by measuring how much infrared light is absorbed. This data would be useful for health and fitness monitoring, but the functionality is not currently enabled in the watch.

As iFixit notes, there are a couple of possible reasons Apple is not currently allowing to watch to display this data … 
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